Re: Dhp 37

Hi Jim,

This verse gives us a fascinating picture of the early oral transmission and the problems that developed with it.
A variant reading for sa.myamessanti is sa~n~namessanti which makes no sense in the context ("they will go to consciousness"?).
sa.myamessanti means "they will tame". Try saying the two together and you will see that they are virtually identical phonologically, so onecan understand, when the words were being written down two or three hundred years after the Buddha's Parinirvaa.na, at least one scribe didn't understand them and transcribed what he heard, but nevertheless he heard the wrong thing.

In the Udaanavarga a variant for sa.myamessanti is damayi.syanti, which means the same thing and sounds alike except for the first letter and the lack of the anusvaara. We know from linguistics typologies that s- and d- are closely related (they are both alveolars) and often d- (an alveolar voiced stop) or t- (an alveolar unvoiced stop) changes into s- (an alveolar fricative) - but not usually the other way around. This happens in Hebrew, for example, where a ta is pronounced as a -t- or as a -s- interchangeably. Brough talks about this (p. 94) for Gaandhaarii where the aspirated d (-dh-) changes into an -s- (which he believes was pronounced as a [z]. Anyways, this raises the intriguing possibility that the original word was indeed damayi.syanti or damayissanti and the intial letter was pronounced as a fricative (somewhere between the 'th-' in English "the" and the 'z-' in "zoo" and mistakenly transcribed as an s- (as their is no voiced sibilant in
  Prakrit or Sanskrit). Otherwise how can one account for the damayi.syanti? It seems it had to be due to some kind of oral confusion

We may never know exactly what happened (there is still the anusvaara to account for and the -may- vs. -my-), but the various transmissions and variants give us some interesting glimpses into the problems of transmission and translation,

Best Wishes, Bryan

Brough, John. 1962. The Gaandhaarii Dharmapada. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers.




________________________________
From: Jim Anderson <jimanderson_on@...>
To: palistudy@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tue, November 24, 2009 10:03:18 AM
Subject: [palistudy] Dhp 37

  
Dhammapadaṃ, 3. Cittavaggo (Thought), Verse 37

dūraṅgamaṃ ekacaraṃ | asarīraṃ guhāsayaṃ ||
ye cittaṃ saṃyamessanti | mokkhanti mārabandhanā || 37 ||

1)

37. Those who bridle their mind which travels far, moves about alone,
is without a body, and hides in the chamber (of the heart), will be
free from the bonds of Mâra (the tempter).

-- Translation by F. Max Müller from The Dhammapada, p. 12,
Vol. X of The Sacred Books of the East, 1881

2)

37. Those who will restrain their thought, which travels far, alone,
incorporeal, lying in the cave (of the heart), will be freed from
Māra's fetter.

-- Translation by K.R. Norman from The Word of the Doctrine, p. 6,
The Pali Text Society, 2000

-- posted on the day of the First Quarter, Novermber 24, 2009





       __________________________________________________________________
Get a sneak peak at messages with a handy reading pane with All new Yahoo! Mail: http://ca.promos.yahoo.com/newmail/overview2/

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]