Re: hello and pajjati at A iv.362

 

Dear Dhivan and Aleix,

The four different variants show that there was some confusion on this word over time. pajjati is the normal form of Skt. padyate, with -dy- > -jj- as it does in most Prakrits. The meaning in Pali is "he goes", so the sentence might be translated "he has achieved or he is going to (pattum understood) achieve". This goes with the commentary papuṇissati.

Indeed one of the variants is gacchati. The other variant paccati (not pacchati) is the passive form of pacati ("he cooks") and means "he suffers" (lit. "he/it is cooked", Skt. pacyate),  so I'm not sure how that would fit the context.The change of a voiced velar stop to an unvoiced one is quite common in the suttas - I argue elsewhere that this is because many of the non Indo Aryan language speakers who were familiar with Pali and/or the other vernaculars in which the suttas were transmitted as a second language,  lacked the voiced/unvoiced distinction in their native language (e.g. Dravidian speakers).

pabbati is not a verb form that I am familiar with. It is perhaps a Prākrit form of the Skt. verb pavate ("he goes"), with the common -v- > -b- interchange which one sees all the time between Burmese and Sri Lankan forms of various words (byanti-, vyanti- and many others).

There is always the other possibility that the -jj- represents a  dialect form of a  -yy- or a -ry- (e.g. arya > ayya), but I can't think of a word the starts with p- where this might apply,

Best wishes,

Bryan

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From: "Aleix Ruiz Falqués ruydaleixo@... [palistudy]" <palistudy@yahoogroups.com>
To: palistudy@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, November 25, 2015 7:48 AM
Subject: Re: [palistudy] hello and pajjati at A iv.362

 

Dear Dhivan, nice to see you here!

I recently got an interesting explanation of this passage by Yukio Yamanaka, who has been extensively working on verbal forms in Pali. I am writing from memory, but I think if you look at the critical apparatus of PTS ed. there is a variant reading pacchati, which seems to be the Pali form for pra+āp+sya+ti. It seems that Buddhaghosa actually read pacchati, not pajjati. In this way the passage makes more sense.

With all best wishes,

Aleix

2015-11-25 19:17 GMT+07:00 Dhivan Jones dhivanjones@... [palistudy] <palistudy@yahoogroups.com>:

 

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