Pali

• 1. Introduction

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  Pali is a language that the vast majority of people on earth have never spoken, yet hundreds of millions hear it chanted in temples every week. On the 3rd of October 2024, the Government of India formally designated it a classical language of the country. It is the tongue preserved in the Tipiṭaka, the great scriptural collection of Theravada Buddhism, and it still occupies the center of religious life across Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia. What makes Pali unusual is that almost nobody knows exactly where it came from. Scholars have spent centuries arguing about its birthplace, its relationship to the language the Buddha himself spoke, and even how to spell its name. There is no single standard spelling to this day: long ā or short a, retroflex ḷ or plain l. Each combination appears in textbooks. The language was never anyone's mother tongue in the way that French or Swahili is. It emerged as something stranger: a composite, a compromise, possibly a lingua franca stitched together from the dialects of ancient North India. Yet within a few centuries of that origin, monks and scholars were calling it the root language of all beings. How a deliberately constructed scholarly medium became the sacred language of one of the world's great religious traditions is a story that runs from the famine-struck monasteries of ancient Sri Lanka to the gilded temples of the Pagan Kingdom to a Methodist missionary publishing a dictionary in 1824.

• 2. A Name Without a Home

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  K. R. Norman, one of the foremost scholars of the language, has argued that the very name Pali arose from a misunderstanding. The word appears to come from commentarial manuscripts, where pali referred to the line of original sacred text being quoted, as opposed to the vernacular commentary that followed it. Somewhere in that tradition, pali was mistaken for the proper name of a language rather than a technical label for a canonical passage. R. C. Childers translated the word as meaning 'series', and suggested the early Buddhists extended that sense to mean 'a series of books', so that the phrase pali-bhasa came to denote the language of the texts. The name itself does not appear anywhere in the canonical literature. In some commentary writing it is replaced entirely by the word tanti, meaning a string or lineage. Norman identifies the name as having solidified in Sri Lanka early in the second millennium, during a period when Pali was being revived as a courtly and literary language. The geographic question is equally tangled. Since the Theravada commentaries, Pali has been identified with Magadhi Prakrit, the language of the ancient kingdom of Magadha in what is now Bihar, and this was taken to mean it was the language the Buddha himself used. In the 19th century, the British Orientalist Robert Caesar Childers advanced this theory, arguing that pali meant 'line, row, series', and that early Buddhists extended it to mean a series of sacred books. Modern scholarship has reversed that verdict. Comparing Pali with inscriptions known to be in Magadhi Prakrit reveals clear differences. Scholars now generally regard Pali as having originated from a western dialect rather than an eastern one, pointing to its shared features with the Junagadh rock inscription of Rudradaman in Kathiawar and with the Central-Western Prakrit of the Hathigumpha inscription. A. K. Warder specifically associates it with the realm of Avanti, where the Sthavira Nikaya was centered. Pali does retain certain eastern features, sometimes called Magadhisms, which kept the Magadha identification alive for so long. The current scholarly consensus, summarized by Bhikkhu Bodhi, is that Pali is closely related to the language, or more likely the various regional dialects, that the Buddha himself spoke, but it is not identical to any single one of them.

• 3. How the Canon Was Preserved

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  Theravada tradition, as recorded in the Mahavamsa, the chronicle of Sri Lanka, states that the Tipitaka was first committed to writing during the first century BCE. The move away from oral preservation was described as a response to specific pressures: famine, war, and the growing influence of the rival monastic tradition of the Abhayagiri Vihara. Scholars generally accept this account, though they note that Pali had probably already begun to be written down before that date. With only a few possible exceptions, the entire corpus of Pali texts known today is believed to derive from a single institution: the Anuradhapura Maha Viharaya in Sri Lanka. Literary evidence shows Theravadins surviving in mainland India as late as the 13th century, but no Pali texts specifically attributable to that tradition have been recovered. Some texts, such as the Milindapanha, may have been composed in India and then brought to Sri Lanka; the versions that survived are those preserved at the Mahavihara and shared with monasteries in Theravada Southeast Asia. The manuscript record is far thinner than most people assume. The oldest surviving Pali manuscript was found in Nepal and dates to the 9th century. It consists of four palm-leaf folios written in a transitional script derived from the Gupta script, preserving a fragment of the Cullavagga. The oldest manuscripts from Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia date only to the 13th-15th century, and very few manuscripts older than four hundred years have survived at all. Complete manuscripts of the four Nikayas exist only in examples from the 17th century and later. This fragility makes the Anuradhapura tradition's role all the more decisive. The Pali renaissance that began around the 11th century in the vicinity of the Pagan Kingdom spread through royal patronage, with dynasties sponsoring monastic lineages traced back to that single Sri Lankan source.

• 4. Buddhaghosa and the Resurgence

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  When Pali entered a period of decline in Sri Lanka around the 4th or 5th century, the work of one scholar reversed its trajectory. Buddhaghosa compiled commentaries, most famously the Visuddhimagga, that condensed and codified the Sinhala commentarial tradition preserved in Sri Lanka since the 3rd century BCE. His output was largely responsible for restoring Pali as a significant scholarly language in Buddhist thought. The Pali renaissance that followed eventually spread across mainland Southeast Asia. The earliest Pali inscriptions on the mainland date to the first millennium, with some possibly reaching back as far as the 4th century. These inscriptions are found in what are now Burma, Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia, and they may have arrived from southern India rather than from Sri Lanka. By the 11th century, the Pagan Kingdom became the center of a new wave of Pali learning, and this era brought Sanskrit literary conventions into Pali composition for the first time. Poetic forms such as kavya, which had no precedent in earlier Pali writing, began to be adopted. One milestone of this period was the Subodhalaṅkara, a work on Pali poetics published in the 14th century, attributed to Sangharakkhita Mahasami and modeled on the Sanskrit Kavyadarsha. The language also served diplomatic purposes. Correspondence between royal courts in Sri Lanka and mainland Southeast Asia was conducted in Pali, and grammars aimed at speakers of Sinhala, Burmese, and other languages were produced to support this network. A form of Pali known as Indochinese Pali, or Kham Pali, emerged from this transmission. Peter Masefield has argued that this variety, long dismissed as degraded, is actually an internally consistent dialect. The reason for its distinctive forms is practical: certain character combinations are difficult to write in the regional scripts, which drove systematic adaptation rather than careless error.

• 5. Western Discovery

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  Pali first entered Western writing through Simon de la Loubere's account of his travels in the kingdom of Siam. The first grammar and dictionary appeared in 1824, published by Methodist missionary Benjamin Clough, followed two years later by a joint study from Eugène Burnouf and Christian Lassen titled Essai sur le Pali, ou Langue sacrée de la presqu'île au-delà du Gange. Robert Childers produced the first modern Pali-English dictionary in 1872 and 1875. His Pali-English dictionary, which drew partly on his own earlier work, received the Volney Prize in 1876. The founding of the Pali Text Society in 1881 gave the field a permanent institutional home. Based in the United Kingdom, the society was partly a response to an incongruity its founders found troubling: despite Britain's colonial holdings that included Sri Lanka and Burma, British institutions allocated very little funding to Indology, lagging well behind Germany, Russia, and even Denmark. The Danish Royal Library, for instance, built up major manuscript collections and scholarly traditions without any comparable colonial connection to the region. Childers's dictionary was quickly outpaced by the society's growing research. Planning for a new dictionary began in the early 1900s, but delays including the outbreak of World War I meant the work was not completed until 1925. T. W. Rhys Davids, in his book Buddhist India, and Wilhelm Geiger, in his book Pali Literature and Language, proposed that Pali originated as a lingua franca among people who used differing dialects across North India, a common language of culture employed at the time of the Buddha. The Maha Bodhi Society, founded by Anagarika Dhammapala, became one of the organizations promoting Pali revival in India itself during the 19th century.

• 6. Sacred Power and Living Practice

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  By the time of the Pali commentaries, compiled around the 4th or 5th century, anonymous authors were describing Pali as the natural language and the root language of all beings. This was a striking reversal of the early Buddhist attitude toward language. Sanskrit was held in Brahmanical tradition to be the unchanging speech of the gods, in which every word carried inherent significance. Early Buddhist traditions rejected this view entirely, treating words as conventional and mutable signs. Pali inherited that skepticism and in part replaced Sanskrit in Buddhist contexts because of it. Yet Pali recitation came to be understood as carrying its own supernatural power, comparable to the role of Ancient Egyptian, Latin, or Hebrew in the mystical traditions of the West. In the earliest strata of Buddhist literature, Pali dharanis appear as charms against snakebite. In Sri Lanka, recitation of the vows of Angulimala is believed to ease the pain of childbirth. In Thailand, chanting a portion of the Abhidhammapitaka is held to benefit the recently departed, and this ceremony can occupy as much as seven working days. There is nothing in the Abhidhammapitaka text itself relating to that purpose, and the origins of the custom remain unclear. Pali died out as a literary language in mainland India in the 14th century, surviving elsewhere until the 18th. Dharmananda Kosambi was among the scholars who labored to revive it in Indian academic life. Today it is studied primarily to access Buddhist scriptures and is frequently chanted in ritual contexts. The secular literature it preserves, including historical chronicles, medical texts, and inscriptions, also carries considerable historical weight, offering a view onto phases of Indian and Southeast Asian civilization that few other sources document.

• 7. The Architecture of the Language

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  Pali is a highly inflected language, meaning almost every word carries, alongside its root meaning, one or more affixes that shape that meaning. Nouns inflect for three genders, two numbers, and in principle eight cases: nominative, vocative, accusative, instrumental, dative, ablative, genitive, and locative. Verbs inflect for tense, voice, mood, person, and number. The tenses include present, preterite, and future, and there is also a conditional and an optative mood for expressing wishes and unreal conditions. This structural richness means that word order is relatively free; the verb typically falls at the end of a clause, but this is not obligatory. Nearly every word in Pali has cognates in the other Middle Indo-Aryan languages known as the Prakrits. Its relationship to Sanskrit is complex rather than direct. Pali descends not from Vedic Sanskrit but from one or more dialects that differed from Vedic despite many surface similarities. The resemblance to Sanskrit is often exaggerated, partly because later Sanskrit compositions were themselves influenced by Middle Indic developments and borrowed from its lexicon. Pali in turn borrowed technical terminology from Sanskrit, either directly or with phonological adjustment. The phonological distance between Sanskrit and Pali is systematic enough that scholars have mapped out the regular transformation rules. Sanskrit sibilants collapse into a single Pali s; voiced aspirates occasionally simplify to h, so that bhavati becomes hoti; and a large number of consonant clusters resolve through assimilation, producing the doubled consonants that characterize Pali spelling. The opening verse of the Dhammapada illustrates these qualities in a compact form. Three compounds, manopubbangama, manosetttha, and manomaya, together assert that the dharmas have mind as their leader, mind as their chief, and are made by mind. Acharya Buddharakkhita translated this as: 'Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought.'