Pāli Variants: A Typology (Part I)

Abstract

There are thousands of variants in the Pāli canon. This paper examines the reasons and processes by which they arise with many examples. There are eight major factors involved: 1) The nature of the source transmission, i.e. the different dialects and/or koiné in which the Buddha taught prevalent in north India (§2.1). 2) Natural, diachronic language change over time which tended to simplify by, for example, voicing or eliminating unvoiced stops, replacing aspirated stops with aspirates only, etc. (§2.2). 3) Sanskritizations which acted to “restore” Pāli to its putative “original” OI form (§2.3). 4) Linguistic diffusion from neighbouring IA languages and dialects where one dialect might interact with and alter another (§2.4.1); linguistic diffusion from autochthonous languages (§2.4.2); linguistic diffusion due to bilingual speakers of Dravidian and Middle Indic (MI), whose native language was non Indo-Aryan (IA), and who had to adapt a foreign phonemic system into the MI transmission (§2.4.3); linguistic diffusion due to foreign word borrowing from non-IA languages into MI, confusion due to the transcription of these “foreign” words, and lack of knowledge of the Pāli language (§2.4.4). 5) Oral transmission ambiguity and errors due to memory, recitation and auditory issues (oral/aural); a pot pourri category subsuming all seven of the above processes (§2.1–§2.4.4) and additional variants which are purely sonic in nature (§2.5). 6) The introduction of explanatory glosses into the main transmission, a practice which was going on probably from the time of the Buddha himself (§2.6). 7) Orthographic variation in spelling and copyist errors, sometimes due to the influence of the copyists’ native language, whose phonetic/phonemic system was foreign to MI (§2.7). 8) Harmonization and standardization of the canon by the later grammarians (§2.8). All of these factors introduce changes into the Buddhavacana which are preserved in the canon (or can be reconstructed from it). A series of examples from the Theragāthā, one of the oldest of Buddhist works, is given to illustrate these processes.