Re: Yā tesaṃ tesaṃ sattānaṃ tamhi tamhi sattanikāye jāti

On Jan 5, 2019, at 07:43, Balaji balaji.ramasubramanian@... [palistudy] <palistudy@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

Neither.

sattānaṃ belongs with tesaṃ-tesaṃ. And -ānaṃ ending already declines satta and so it is a possessive case of satta. If you're asking what do the sattā possess, then you might say jāti, but that is not exactly right. This is because sattānaṃ doesn't have a standing in this sentence without tesaṃ-tesaṃ. When such declined pronouns occur together, it means "respectively".

By the way, the order of words has nothing to do with the meaning in Pāli and Sanskrit. You have to understand which words belong together using kārakaṃ. For example all of these are exactly equivalent:

sabbe sattā laddhasampattito mā vigacchantu

sabbe sattā mā laddhasampattito vigacchantu

mā sabbe sattā laddhasampattito vigacchantu

sabbē sattā laddhasampattito vigacchantu mā

sabbe laddhasampattito mā sattā vigacchantu

Since we have 5 unique words here you can get a total 120 permutations, and all of those sentences are exactly equivalent in meaning!

So the better thing to do is to look for the case and group words of the same case together. This is a strategy that works if you don't have "compound/complex sentences" ; where two separate sentences are joined together into one. You have such cases if someone is quoting someone else's statement, or if someone is describing two separate incidents in one sentence. Aside from those scenarios, (especially in this case) you can go by simply grouping words by their case.

So:

yā goes with jāti                                     that birth

taṃhi-taṃhi goes with sattanikāye          in those respective realms

tesaṃ-tesaṃ goes with sattānaṃ             of those [respective] beings

The pattern is the same: the left column has the pronouns, the right column has the nouns, and their cases match.

One last note: when pronouns are repeated like that, they are actually not separate words, they are actually treated as a single group. The repetition has the meaning of "respectively". This is an implied meaning.

So hope all that helped and wasn't more confusing.

Thanks,

Balaji

On Fri, Jan 4, 2019 at 7:15 AM Yuttadhammo Bhikkhu yuttadhammo@... [palistudy] <palistudy@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

Dear friends,

I'm wondering about the relationship between sattānaṃ and jāti in the passage Yā tesaṃ tesaṃ sattānaṃ tamhi tamhi sattanikāye jāti 

Bhikkhu Bodhi's translation is "The birth of the various beings into the various orders of beings"

But the grammar doesn't seem to support exactly this translation, though I admit my Pali grammar understanding is not great.

yā jāti is singular of course, and yā seems to suggest a literal singular birth, which wouldn't really make sense if it was "the birth of beings". sattānaṃ comes before sattanikāye so wouldn't it make better sense to relate the two and translate as something like "that birth in this or that being-group of these or those beings"?

I'm not actually trying to criticize the translation, as it seems fine for general purposes, I'm just trying to understand whether sattānaṃ is possessive of sattanikāye or jāti.

Thanks,

Yuttadhammo