Pali
Pāli is a Middle Indo-Aryan language that is widely studied as the sacred language of Theravada Buddhism and the language of the Tipiṭaka. Pali was designated a classical language of India by the Government of India on 3 October 2024.
Origin and development
Etymology
The word 'Pali' is used as a name for the language of the Theravada canon. The word seems to have its origins in commentarial traditions, wherein the was distinguished from the commentary or vernacular translation that followed it in the manuscript. K. R. Norman suggests that its emergence was based on a misunderstanding of the compound, with being interpreted as the name of a particular language.The name Pali does not appear in the canonical literature, and in commentary literature is sometimes substituted with, meaning a string or lineage. This name seems to have emerged in Sri Lanka early in the second millennium CE during a resurgence in the use of Pali as a courtly and literary language.
As such, the name of the language has caused some debate among scholars of all ages; the spelling of the name also varies, being found with both long "ā" and short "a", and also with either a voiced retroflex lateral approximant or non-retroflex "l" sound. Both the long ā and retroflex are seen in the ISO 15919/ALA-LC rendering, ; however, to this day there is no single, standard spelling of the term, and all four possible spellings can be found in textbooks. R. C. Childers translates the word as "series" and states that the language "bears the epithet in consequence of the perfection of its grammatical structure".
Geographic origin
There is persistent confusion regarding the relationship of to the vernacular spoken in the ancient kingdom of Magadha, which was located in what is now Bihar. Beginning in the Theravada commentaries, Pali was identified with 'Magadhi', the language of the kingdom of Magadha, and this was taken to also be the language that the Buddha used during his life. In the 19th century, the British Orientalist Robert Caesar Childers argued that the true or geographical name of the Pali language was Magadhi Prakrit, and that because pāḷi means "line, row, series", the early Buddhists extended the meaning of the term to mean "a series of books", so pāḷibhāsā means "language of the texts".However, modern scholarship has regarded Pali as a mix of several Prakrits from around the 3rd century BCE, combined and partially Sanskritized. There is no attested dialect of Middle Indo-Aryan with all the features of Pali. In the modern era, it has been possible to compare Pali with inscriptions known to be in Magadhi Prakrit, as well as other texts and grammars of that language. While none of the existing sources specifically document pre-Ashokan Magadhi, the available sources suggest that Pali is not equatable with that language.
Modern scholars generally regard Pali as having originated from a Western dialect rather than an Eastern one. Pali has some commonalities with both the Junagadh rock inscription of Rudradaman in Kathiawar and the Central-Western Prakrit found in the eastern Hathigumpha inscription. These similarities lead scholars to associate Pali with this region of western India. Nonetheless, Pali does retain some eastern features that have been referred to as Māgadhisms.
Pāḷi, as a Middle Indo-Aryan language, differs from Sanskrit more in terms of its dialectal base than in the time of its origin. A number of its morphological and lexical features show that it is not a direct continuation of Rigveda| Sanskrit. Instead it descends from one or more dialects that were, despite many similarities, different from.
Early history
Theravada commentaries refer to Pali as "Magadhi Prakrit" or the "language of Magadha". This identification first appears in the commentaries, and may have been an attempt by Buddhists to associate themselves more closely with the Maurya Empire.However, only some of the Buddha's teachings were delivered in the historical territory of Magadha. Scholars consider it likely that he taught in several closely related dialects of Middle Indo-Aryan, which had a high degree of mutual intelligibility.
Theravada tradition, as recorded in chronicles like the Mahāvaṃsa, states that the Tipitaka was first committed to writing during the first century BCE. This move away from the previous tradition of oral preservation is described as being motivated by threats to the Sangha from famine, war, and the growing influence of the rival tradition of the Abhayagiri Vihāra. This account is generally accepted by scholars, though there are indications that Pali had already begun to be recorded in writing by this date. By this point in its history, scholars consider it likely that Pali had already undergone some initial assimilation with Sanskrit, such as the conversion of the Middle-Indic bahmana to the more familiar Sanskrit brāhmana that contemporary brahmins used to identify themselves.
In Sri Lanka, Pali is thought to have entered into a period of decline ending around the 4th or 5th century, but ultimately survived. The work of Buddhaghosa was largely responsible for the resurgence of Pali as a significant scholarly language in Buddhist thought. The Visuddhimagga, and the other commentaries that Buddhaghosa compiled, codified and condensed the Sinhala commentarial tradition that had been preserved and expanded in Sri Lanka since the 3rd century BCE.
With only a few possible exceptions, the entire corpus of Pali texts known today is believed to derive from the Anuradhapura Maha Viharaya in Sri Lanka. While literary evidence exists of Theravadins in mainland India surviving into the 13th century, no Pali texts specifically attributable to this tradition have been recovered. Some texts, such as the Milindapañha, may have been composed in India before being transmitted to Sri Lanka, but the surviving versions of the texts are those preserved by the Mahavihara in Sri Lanka and shared with monasteries in Theravada Southeast Asia.
The earliest inscriptions in Pali found in mainland Southeast Asia date back to the first millennium CE, with some possibly dating as early as the 4th century. Inscriptions are found in what are now Burma, Laos, Thailand and Cambodia and may have spread from southern India rather than Sri Lanka. By the 11th century, a so-called "Pali renaissance" began in the vicinity of the Pagan Kingdom, gradually spreading to the rest of mainland Southeast Asia as royal dynasties sponsored monastic lineages derived from the Anuradhapura Maha Viharaya. This era was also characterized by the adoption of Sanskrit conventions and poetic forms that had not been features of earlier Pali literature. This process began as early as the 5th century, but intensified early in the second millennium as Pali texts on poetics and composition modeled on Sanskrit forms began to grow in popularity. One milestone of this period was the publication of the Subodhālaṅkāra in the 14th century, a work attributed to Sangharakkhita Mahāsāmi and modeled on the Sanskrit Kavyadarsha.
Peter Masefield devoted considerable research to a form of Pali known as Indochinese Pali, also referred to as 'Kham Pali'. Up until now, this has been considered a degraded form of Pali; however, Masefield states that further examination of a very considerable corpus of texts will likely reveal that this is an internally consistent Pali dialect. The reason for the changes is that some combinations of characters are difficult to write in those scripts. Masefield further states that upon the third reintroduction of Theravada Buddhism into Sri Lanka, records in Thailand state that a large number of texts were also taken. The disappearance of monastic ordination in Sri Lanka was accompanied by the loss of many texts. Therefore, the Sri Lankan Pali canon was first translated into Indo-Chinese Pali and then back into Pali.
Despite an expansion of the number and influence of Mahavihara-derived monastics, this resurgence of Pali study resulted in no production of any new surviving literary works in Pali. During this era, correspondences between royal courts in Sri Lanka and mainland Southeast Asia were conducted in Pali, and grammars aimed at speakers of Sinhala, Burmese, and other languages were produced. The emergence of the term 'Pali' as the name of the language of the Theravada canon also occurred during this era.
Manuscripts and inscriptions
While Pali is generally recognized as an ancient language, no epigraphical or manuscript evidence has survived from the earliest eras. The earliest samples of Pali discovered are inscriptions believed to date from 5th to 8th century located in mainland Southeast Asia, specifically central Thailand and lower Myanmar. These inscriptions typically consist of short excerpts from the Pali Canon and non-canonical texts, and include several examples of the protective Pratītyasamutpāda gāthā.The oldest surviving Pali manuscript was discovered in Nepal dating to the 9th century. It is in the form of four palm-leaf folios using a transitional script deriving from the Gupta script to scribe a fragment of the Cullavagga. The oldest known manuscripts from Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia date to the 13th–15th century, with few surviving examples. Very few manuscripts older than 400 years have survived, and complete manuscripts of the four Nikāyas are only available in examples from the 17th century and later.
Early Western research
Pali was first mentioned in Western literature in Simon de la Loubère's descriptions of his travels in the kingdom of Siam. An early grammar and dictionary was published by Methodist missionary Benjamin Clough in 1824, and an initial study published by Eugène Burnouf and Christian Lassen in 1826. The first modern Pali-English dictionary was published by Robert Childers in 1872 and 1875. Following the foundation of the Pali Text Society, English Pali studies grew rapidly and Childers's dictionary became outdated. Planning for a new dictionary began in the early 1900s, but delays meant that work was not completed until 1925.T. W. Rhys Davids in his book Buddhist India, and Wilhelm Geiger in his book Pāli Literature and Language, suggested that Pali may have originated as a lingua franca or common language of culture among people who used differing dialects in North India, used at the time of the Buddha and employed by him. Another scholar states that at that time it was "a refined and elegant vernacular of all Aryan-speaking people". Modern scholarship has not arrived at a consensus on the issue; there are a variety of conflicting theories with supporters and detractors. After the death of the Buddha, Pali may have evolved among Buddhists out of the language of the Buddha as a new artificial language. R. C. Childers, who held to the theory that Pali was Old Magadhi, wrote: "Had Gautama never preached, it is unlikely that Magadhese would have been distinguished from the many other vernaculars of Hindustan, except perhaps by an inherent grace and strength which make it a sort of Tuscan among the Prakrits."