Word Finder - pali

definition

A vertical pillar along the inner septal margin of a coral.

Thus Burma possesses two kinds of literature, Pali and Burmese.

Pali, though only a form of Hindu literature, has a separate history, for it died in India and was preserved in Ceylon, whence it was imported to Burma and Siam as the language of religion.

These scholars (most of them members of the Buddhist Order, but many of them laymen) not only copied and recopied the Indian Pali books, but wrote a very large number themselves.

Franke in two articles in the Journal of the Pali Text Society for 1903, and in his Geschichte and Kritik der einheimischen Pali Grammatik.

It would seem that up to the 4th century of our era the Sinhalese had written exclusively in their own tongue; that is to say that for six centuries they had studied and understood Pali as a dead language without using it as a means of literary expression.

The thirteen words, in a local dialect of Pali, are written in very ancient characters, and are the oldest inscription as yet discovered in India.

For the history of Pali before the canonical books were composed we have no direct evidence.

Two volumes only of these, out of about twenty still extant in MS., have been edited for the Pali Text Society.

It is first mentioned in a very ancient Pali ballad preserved in the Sutta Nipata (verse 583).

All later Buddhist accounts, whether Pali or Sanskrit, repeat the same story.

The king's language and the royal writing, and also religious words are, however, apparently of Aryan origin and akin to Pali.

The Burmese alphabet is borrowed from the Aryan Sanskrit through the Pali of Upper India.

The Pali is by far the more ancient, including as it does the Buddhist scriptures that originally found their way to Burma from Ceylon and southern India.

A Patamabyan examination for marks in the Pali language was first instituted in 1896 and is held annually.

It is probable that Burma is the Chryse Regio of Ptolemy, a name parallel in meaning to Sonaparanta, the classic Pali title assigned to the country round the capital in Burmese documents.

Some of the priests are learned in the Buddhist scriptures, and most of the Pali scholarship in Siam is to be found in monasteries, but there is no learning of a secular nature.

It is to him we owe the commentaries on seven of the shorter canonical books, consisting almost entirely of verses, and also the commentary on the Netti, perhaps the oldest Pali work outside the canon.

Extracts from the latter work, and the whole of three out of the seven others, have been published by the Pali Text Society.

On the coins struck in India, the well-known Indian alphabet (called Brahmi by the Indians, the older form of the Devanagari) is used; on the coins struck in Afghanistan and in the Punjab the Kharoshthi alphabet, which is derived directly from the Aramaic and was in common use in the western parts of India, as is shown by one of the inscriptions of Asoka and by the recent discovery of many fragments of Indian manuscripts, written in Kharoshthi, in eastern Turkestan (formerly this alphabet has been called Arianic or Bactrian Pali; the true name is derived from Indian sources).

And gladness springs up within him on his realizing that, and joy arises to him thus gladdened, and so rejoicing all his frame becomes at ease, and being thus at ease he is filled with a sense of peace, and in that peace his heart is stayed."9 To have realized the Truths, and traversed the Path; to have broken the Bonds, put an end to the Intoxications, and got rid of the Hindrances, is to have attained the ideal, the Fruit, as it is called, of Arahatship. One might fill columns with the praises, many of them among the most beautiful passages in Pali poetry and prose, lavished on this condition of mind, the state of the man made perfect according to the Buddhist faith.

As such they supposed the" dying out "must mean the dying out of a" soul "; and endless were the discussions as to whether this meant eternal trance, or absolute annihilation, of the" soul."It is now thirty years since the right interpretation, founded on the canonical texts, has been given, but outside the ranks of Pali scholars the old blunder is still often repeated.

More modern, and much more elaborate, forms are given in the Yogavacaras Manual of Indian Mysticism as practised by Buddhists, edited by Rhys Davids from a unique MS. for the Pali Text Society in 1896.

Each of the two schools kept an arrangement of the canon - still in Pali, or some allied dialect.

These books remained the only authorities for about five centuries, but they all, except only our extant Pali Nikayas, have been lost in India.

We talk necessarily of Pali books.

Each sutra (Pali, sutta) is very short; usually occupying only a page, or perhaps two, and containing a single proposition.

Of the 186, 175 had by 1907 been edited for the Pali Text Society, and the remainder were either in the press or in preparation.

The whole of the Pali text has been published by the Pali Text Society, but only portions have been translated into English.

The whole of it has been published in five volumes by the Pali Text Society.

The original text has been published by the Pali Text Society.

So far the canon, almost all of which is now accessible to readers of Pali.

The Pali text has been edited and the work translated into English.

The former, in Pali, discusses a number of questions then of importance in the Buddhist community; and it relies throughout, as does the Milinda, on the canonical works, which it quotes largely.

The Pali Text Society is still publishing two volumes a year; and the Russian Academy has inaugurated a series to contain the most important of the Sanskrit works still buried in MS. We have also now accessible in Pali fourteen volumes of the commentaries of the great 5th- century scholars in south India and Ceylon, most of them the works either of Buddhaghosa of Budh Gaya, or of Dhammapala of Kancipura (the ancient name of Conjeeveram).

He found that the Buddhism in his Pali MSS., which came from Ceylon, differed from that in his Sanskrit MSS., which came from Nepal.

The philosophical basis of the old ethics is overshadowed by new 1 See Journal of the Pali Text Society, 1896, pp. 87-92.

The earliest written books are in Pali and Buddhist Sanskrit.

But it disappeared from these parts in 1820 or early in 1821, and was not heard of again till July 1836, when a disease broke out into violence at the town of Pali in Marwar in Rajputana.

It spread from Pali to the province of Meywar, but died out spontaneously in the hot season of 1837.

Though this doctrine is especially insisted upon in Buddhism, and its designation as a specific term (Pali, Kamma) may be due to that creed, the notion itself was doubtless already prevalent in pre-Buddhist times.

The literary documents, both in Sanskrit and Pali, dating from about the time of Buddha onwards - particularly the two epic poems, the Mahabharata and Ramayana - still show us in the main the personnel of the old pantheon; but the character of the gods has changed; they have become anthropomorphized and almost purely mythological figures.

The ancient books, preserved in the Pali Pitakas, being mainly occupied with the details of Arahatship, lost their exclusive value in the eyes of those whose attention was being directed to the details of Bodhisatship. And the opinion that every leader in their religious circles, every teacher distinguished among them for his sanctity of life, or for his extensive learning, was a Bodhisat, who might have and who probably had inherited the karma of some great teacher of old, opened the door to a flood of superstitious fancies.

In doctrine the great Tibetan teacher, who had no access to the Pali Pitakas, adhered in the main to the purer forms of the Mahayana school; in questions of church government he took little part, and did not dispute the titular supremacy of the Sakya Lamas.

The later books say that they were all converted at once; but, according to the most ancient Pali record - though their old love and reverence had been so rekindled when the Buddha came near that their cold resolutions quite broke down, and they vied with each other in such acts of personal attention as an Indian disciple loves to pay to his teacher, - yet it was only after the Buddha had for five days talked to them, sometimes separately, sometimes together, that they accepted in its entirety his plan of salvation.'

The latter have only as yet been traced, and that doubtfully, as far back as the 5th century after Christ; the former are almost certainly the same as the Niganthas, who are referred to in numerous passages of the Buddhist Pali Pitakas, and must therefore be at least as old as the 6th century B.C. In many of these passages the Niganthas are mentioned as contemporaneous with the Buddha; and details enough are given concerning their leader Nigantha Nata-putta (that is, the Nigantha of the Jnatrika clan) to enable us to identify him, without any doubt, as the same person as the Vaddhamana Maha-vira of the Jain books.

The text, published by the Pali Text Society, is of 140 pages octavo.

In 1833 he completed his translation of the Bible; in succeeding years he compiled a Burmese grammar, a Burmese dictionary, and a Pali dictionary.

These have now been published by the Pali Text Society.

Rhys Davids, in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1892, contains an abstract of the Katha Vatthu; "On the Abhidhamma books of the Sarvastivadins," by Prof. Takakusu, in Journal of the Pali Text Society, 1905.

Na pali coast hardened lava a quarter mile away.