Re: Article on the Uraga verses (Sn 1–17)

Dear Ven Bodhi,

I know that you are going to be mostly off-line until mid-March but I wanted briefly to reply before too much time goes by. Thanks again for your extremely thoughtful precise comments both on the maning of the expression /khaggavisāṇa/ and on the Uraga verses. I don’t think I have anything more to add on the Uraga verses, except again that a more thorough study of the non-dualist strand of dhamma in early Buddhist texts would be great; but as for your comments on /khaggavisāṇa/ I could say something in reply to your interest in unambiguous ancient uses of /khaggavisāṇa/ in the sense of ‘rhinoceros’. Among the various arguments I put forward in my article concerning the ambiguity of /khaggavisāṇa/, I think the most ambiguous (so to speak) is the usage in the Jain text the Jinacaritra. There the Prakrit expression /khaggivisāṇaṃ/ is used alongside other words for animals, and is followed by a verse summary in which /khaggivisāṇaṃ/ is replaced by /khagge/. Of course this is not an example of the unambiguous use of /khaggavisāṇa/ to mean ‘rhinoceros’. But my argument overall was not that Pāli /khaggavisāṇa/ meant ‘rhinoceros’ in an unambiguous sense but that readers of the time would have ‘heard’ the expression as referring ambiguously to both the rhinoceros and its horn. And if this was the case then it is acceptable to translate /khaggavisāṇa/ as ‘rhinoceros’, a translation with many advantages from a poetical point of view.

With all good wishes, and very much looking forward to the publication of your translation of the Sutta-nipāta,
Dhivan