hello and pajjati at A iv.362

Dear Pāli friends,

First, let me introduce myself to you. My name is Dhivan Thomas Jones, and I’ve been studying Pāli for about 10 years, doing quite a lot of reading of Pāli with Margaret Cone in Cambridge before I moved to Bristol, in the west of the UK. I continue to research and write on early Buddhism while teaching philosophy for the Open University here. I heard about the Pāli study group through Bryan Levman, who’s been a great help in my forays into Pāli philology. My first article in the area was ‘Like the rhinoceros or like its horn? The problem of khaggavisāṇa revisited’ in BSR 2014.

Second, I thought I’d put a Pāli problem to you. I’m looking at occurrences of pajjati in the Pāli canon to understand the meaning of uppajjati. Pajjati only occurs once at A iv.362, in the phrase, addhā ayam āyasmā patto vā pajjati vā. The PTS ed. gives some variants on pajjati. The commentary glosses pajjati as pāpuṇissati. Bhikkhu Bodhi (hello) therefore translates addhā ayam āyasmā patto vā pajjati vā as ‘Surely this venerable has attained or will attain’.

My question is, does this mean we should understand Pāli pajjati as a future form of pāpuṇāti / pappoti? Perhaps as an equivalent of Sanskrit prāpsyati (pra+āp+sya+ti)? Or should we think of pajjati here as an inexplicable word that the commentary has made sense of by replacing it with another?

Many thanks for your help,
Dhivan