DhammaTalk

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Brahmi

Relative to the on-going discussion concerning the language used by the Buddha, and what, precisely, he intended by:

"...the much-discussed passage in the Culla-vagga (Vin II 139, 1-16) which tells how two bhikkhus complained that the Buddha's audiences were spoiling his utterances sak¤ya niruttiy¤, and asked the Buddha if they could translate his sermons chandaso, but were forbidden to do so. It is not clear what they were proposing to translate into..."^[1]

My reading of the passage was that not only did the Bhikkhus wish to translate the suttas, but to write them down.

I have been doing a little looking into the understanding of writing at the time of the Buddha. It is clear that writing was well known in the area. Word is that Pali was first written in a script known as Brahmi. This is the script to which virtually all Indo European scripts are related. It, itself, may have had roots in either or both of two earlier scripts: Indus Valley Script, and Semitic scripts; and there is another theory, of course, which says it was developed on it's own.

Check out the credit link for this picture of an Asokan edict (in Brahmi) for a massive site on ancient languages and scripts.

Asoka's Edict at Girnar

Asoka's edict at Girnar

Used with permission: http://www.cs.colostate.edu/~malaiya/scripts.html

The Edicts of King Ashoka An English rendering by Ven. S. Dhammika

On page 131 of Professor Rhys Davids Buddhist India (see References below for the other chapters reprinted on BuddhaDust), he makes the off hand comment that what we really have in the early writing of Brahmi is a syllabary, not an alphabet. But this is just what I have been suggesting all along is the case with the Pali, only without the implication that this is somehow a limitation.

The way I learned Pali (what you get here and there on BuddhaDust as "MozPali") was that what we are today hearing as words was at one time (I believe not yet entirely out of consciousness by the time of the Buddha) considered to be what we would call a sentence. In other words there were no double consonants, or groups of consonants or word endings because each "letter" was pronounced and heard separately.

For example, we say: Appam¤da means: "don't be careless", or "non-carelessness": a + pamada. But track this word through the suttas and you will see that it carries far more weight than just this meaning. What we have in this word is a "story" (actually many many stories) and it is the "moral of the story" that has come down to us as the meaning of the word.

A = one, a, single, to, for, at, satisfaction, question, understanding, against, out, there, this, that, here...
AP = up
P-Pa = Bang, Pow, Boom, Pt'uii
Ma = made, mothered, -ing-a; backwards: m = ing, on-go-ing-ing
Da = Father, this dat that

The thesis suggested here concerning the language of the Buddha is that all the words chosen by The Buddha, from those words available to him at the time, whatsoever those languages may have been called, were those words that had roots back to the time when this business of syllables equaling words was the case with all words.

Further, it is being proposed that this was done with a purpose. The purpose was that these words are heard by all men in a similar way because they relate to sounds heard in nature, or sound like their meaning [onomatopoeia]. This being the case, the Dhamma could be picked up, studied, and understood by someone who had no knowledge whatsoever of Pali.

Now you may be thinking of some student sitting down in some library with a Pali book and a piece of scratch paper figuring out the Dhamma. This is not exactly the way I see it. There are mental states which are attained by seekers that are very powerful in scope. There are many stories in the literature of Eastern Religions which speak about people who have stumbled onto trance states and found themselves speaking languages they know they never learned. These people have found accidentally what is attainable deliberately: high mental states in which it is possible to say that the words approach one and instruct one of their own accord...actually, where all knowledge is avaiable just for the paying attention to it. Today we hear of people who talk to plants...something like that. The intellectual barriers are down, the usual objections are not pulling the blinders down and this powerful mind is able to understand. It is to those who, because of making such an effort as brings them to these high states that this Dhamma, constructed as I am suggesting, yields its meaning apart from the grammar books.

I am not saying that The Buddha ignored conventional speech, I am saying that what we have in the Dhamma is something that can be heard at more than one level; Rhys Davids had his finger right on the doorknob of the 'nother level, but his academic bias made him think that that which was claimed by the academics as an advance in writing was also an advance in communication. I suggest that what we see in the way Rhys Davids dealt with this is proof of the contrary.

American Brahmi Script

This is the result of an abandoned idea of putting together an "American Brahmi" font. As well as the characters shown in this image, the character set would need to be able to modify each consonant for "vowel indicators" (each consonant has the intrinsic vowel "a" and is modified for other vowel sounds by connecting lines from the top, middle, or bottom, left or right) and double consonants would each need their own glyph (double consonants were formed by merging two glyphs -- how, exactly, is uncertain to me, and it was apparently not always done in early versions of the script, and done in different ways at different times). The number of characters which need to be created exceed the capacity of most keyboards out there. Madness to use...and, in any case, as I said elsewhere, my reading of the famous "translation" episode documentated in the Vinaya was that the Buddha objected to his suttas being put down in this script...that there is, in fact, an "error of wrongdoing" connected to doing so even for one syllable. (...just an asside, really, that rule was for bhikkhus, and my guess is it had less to do with the idea of writing it down than it did of directing the bhikkhus to paying attention to what was the most important thing: accomplishing the goal. . . although I can imagine the people of the day editorializing across the back fense about this "writing" stuff being the forerunner of the ultimate corruption of their youth).

^[1]The dialects in which the Buddha preached, H. Bechert (ed.): The Language of the Earliest Buddhist Tradition, Gottingen 1980, pp 61-77...I am reading from a photocopy of a revised version from this source which has no identification.