437
LESSON 15 11 2011 Lakkhana
Sutta Characterized by Action
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LESSON 437
Practice a Sutta a Day Keeps Dukkha Away
AN 3.2
PTS: A i 102
Lakkhana Sutta:
Characterized (by Action)
translated from the Pali
by
Thanissaro Bhikkhu
“Monks,
a fool is characterized by his/her actions. A wise person is characterized by
his/her actions. It is through the activities of one’s life that one’s
discernment shines.
“A
person endowed with three things is to be recognized as a fool. Which three?
Bodily misconduct, verbal misconduct, mental misconduct. A person endowed with
these three things is to be recognized as a fool.
“A
person endowed with three things is to be recognized as a wise person. Which
three? Good bodily conduct, good verbal conduct, good mental conduct. A person
endowed with these three things is to be recognized as a wise person.
“Thus,
monks, you should train yourselves: ‘We will avoid the three things that,
endowed with which, one is to be recognized as a fool. We will undertake &
maintain the three things that, endowed with which, one is to be recognized as
a wise person.’ That’s how you should train yourselves.”
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A
Guide to Learning the Pali Language
by
John
T. Bullitt
See
also “Pali
Language Aids“
It’s
not difficult to learn a little Pali through self-study, using a textbook or
two as a guide. Many people find it helpful to study with others, either in a
formal classroom setting or in a more relaxed Pali study group. For many of us,
the goal is not to become expert scholars and translators of the language, but
simply to become acquainted with enough of the basics of the language to enrich
our personal understanding of the suttas and the Buddha’s teachings. For
self-study, Warder’s Introduction
to Pali
or de Silva’s Pali
Primer
are the basic texts. Johansson’s Pali
Buddhist Texts: An Introductory Reader and Grammar is also immensely
helpful. See the list of Pali
language textbooks
for more recommended titles.
Formal
classroom courses in Pali are offered at many universities with strong Eastern
Religions departments as well as at several Buddhist studies centers and
institutes (see the University of Minnesota’s list of schools that teach less
commonly taught languages, such as Pali). Some university-level Pali courses require
previous acquaintance with Sanskrit. If you are looking for a Pali teacher,
consider asking around at a university to see if there might be a graduate
student willing to tutor you or your study group, perhaps for a small fee. Some
professors may be willing to let you audit a course without going through the
official university registration process.
For
more information of interest to Pali students of all levels, see “Pali Language Aids“
Coping with Pali
diacritical marks
Pali
is a phonetic language with no written alphabet of its own. Students of the
language have therefore relied on their own native alphabets to read and write
Pali, ever since the 1st century BCE, when Sri Lankan scribes first
recorded the Tipitaka in the Sinhala alphabet. But the Europeans who began to
take an interest in South Asian languages in the 19th century
quickly discovered that their own roman alphabet was no match for the wide
range of phonemes (sounds) present in South Asian languages. European scholars
thus began representing the more problematic Pali phonemes by augmenting the
roman alphabet with a system of letter-pairs and diacritics, including the
macron (horizontal bar), dot-over, dot-under, and tilde:
Until
well into the mid-20th century, Pali typefaces using these
characters were used almost exclusively by specialty book publishers; a
scholar’s day-to-day duties of transcribing, translating, and editing had to be
laboriously carried out with typewriter, pen, and a steady hand with which to
apply the diacritics. Unfortunately, the first personal computers failed to address
the typographic challenge of diacritics, as they were designed around a very
limited character set (ASCII) that was only barely able to accommodate the
upper- and lower-case roman letters, ten digits, and a modest sprinkling of
punctuation marks. The extended-ASCII set, which soon followed, offered a suite
of additional special symbols, including many required for northern- and
eastern- European alphabets. But still no macrons or dot-unders. In the absence
of a universally accepted computer representation of non-ASCII characters,
students of non-European languages were left to invent their own stopgap
methods. These range from giving ordinary punctuation marks double-duty as
stand-ins for diacritics, to designing special diacritic fonts (all of which are
incompatible with each other), and everything in between.
A
good written phonetic representation of Pali — indeed, of any language — using
one’s native alphabet as a starting point should aspire to each of the
following ideals:
- It should be readable
by a wide audience. It should introduce a minimum of special characters
that are not already present in the alphabet. It is better to modify an
existing letter with a small diacritic than to introduce an entirely new
character that may look like an alien squiggle to the uninitiated. A
newcomer to Pali, upon seeing a t with a dot-under, should be able
to guess immediately that the letter stands for some variant of a t
sound. - It should be phonetically
precise. The written text should precisely and accurately capture
the phonetic content. Each phoneme (sound) should be unambiguously
represented by a unique letter or combination of letters. - It should be easy
to type. Writing Pali should not be a cumbersome exercise in
keyboard gymnastics. Typing an a-macron should not call for a long
series of keystrokes (e.g., Alt-Ctl-Shift-Esc-a). - It should be portable.
If you hand me a book — or send me a text file by e-mail — it should
appear to me exactly as it did to you. I should be able to sound out the
text phonetically exactly as you intended.
No
single method simultaneously realizes all of these goals; no single method is
“best.” (I should note, however, that one system — Unicode — holds
exceptional promise — but not until its fonts and keyboard mappings become more
seamlessly and universally integrated into the mainstream of word processors,
HTML authoring software, and web and e-mail clients.) The choice of which
method to use therefore depends both on your particular needs (e.g., Do you
demand phonetic precision? Are you printing a book or dashing off a quick
e-mail?) and on the typing, printing, and computing resources you have at your disposal
(e.g., Do you have a Pali font? Does your PC support Unicode?).
In
what follows I’ve singled out some of the more common strategies that Pali
students have used in recent decades, running the gamut from ignoring
diacritics altogether to using Unicode fonts. I evaluate the success of each
strategy in achieving the above-mentioned goals, to help you decide which
method best suits your needs.
Method 1. Ignore the diacritics
This
is certainly the simplest method. But the cost of that simplicity is heavy: the
irretrievable loss of crucial pronunciation details. This is the method I use
at Access to Insight. (I should add that I do make use of the palatal nasal ñ
because it is so easy to implement using HTML and because it is contained in
the extended-ASCII character set found on practically everyone’s computer
nowadays.)
|
Examples: |
panatipata itihidam |
|
Readability: |
Excellent |
|
Phonetics: |
Poor |
|
Ease of use: |
Excellent |
|
Portability: |
Excellent |
|
Overall: |
Fair. |
|
Uses: |
Informal |
Capitalized
letters represent letters with an accompanying diacritic. The method is simple,
but it has ambiguities: how, for example, would you distinguish between the
palatal and guttural n (n with a dot-under, and n with a dot-over)?
|
Examples: |
pANAtipAtA itihidaM |
|
Readability: |
Poor. |
|
Phonetics: |
Fair. |
|
Ease of use: |
Good. |
|
Portability: |
Excellent |
|
Overall: |
Fair. |
|
Uses: |
Informal |
Method 3. The Velthuis scheme: double
the vowels, punctuate the consonants
In
the Velthuis
scheme
two basic rules are observed:
- Long vowels
(those usually typeset with a macron (bar) above them) are doubled: aa
ii uu - For consonants,
the diacritic mark precedes the letter it affects. Thus, the retroflex
(cerebral) consonants (usually typeset with a dot underneath) are: .t
.th .d .dh .n .l. The pure nasal (niggahiita) m, also typeset with a
dot underneath, is .m. The guttural nasal (n with a dot
above) is represented as “n . The palatal nasal (n with
a tilde) is ~n.
Of
the plain-ASCII methods, this one is the most precise, as it carefully
preserves the significance of each special character. To the uninitiated,
however, the sight of all those doubled vowels and misplaced periods is utterly
bewildering, perhaps leaving them to wonder if someone’s keyboard is broken.
|
Examples: |
paa.naatipaataa itihida.m |
|
Readability: |
Fair. |
|
Phonetics: |
Excellent. |
|
Ease of use: |
Good. |
|
Portability: |
Excellent |
|
Overall: |
Good. |
|
Uses: |
Formal |
HTML
has access to the extended ASCII character set, which includes many accented
non-English European vowels (umlaut, circumflex, etc.), some of which can serve
as reasonable stand-ins for the long Pali vowels (ä ï ü; à ì ù;
or â î û etc.). The palatal n is straightforward: ñ.
Whatever type of accent you adopt, use it consistently.
|
Examples: |
pâ.nâtipâtâ itihidam |
|
Readability: |
Very |
|
Phonetics: |
Fair. |
|
Ease of use: |
Good. |
|
Portability: |
Good. |
|
Overall: |
Fair-Good. |
|
Uses: |
Informal |
This
method attempts to clear up the stuttering of Method 3’s doubled vowels, by
using a little HTML (Method 4).
|
Examples: |
pâ.nâtipâtâ itihida.m |
|
Readability: |
Fair. |
|
Phonetics: |
Excellent. |
|
Ease of use: |
Fair. |
|
Portability: |
Good. |
|
Overall: |
Fair. |
|
Uses: |
Informal |
For
high-quality print projects, nothing beats a well-designed Pali font. For an
extensive review of available Pali and Sanskrit fonts, see Transliteration and
Devanagari Fonts for Sanskrit, by Ulrich Stiehl. The Association for
Insight Meditation’s Pali Font
Resources page
offers several ANSI and Unicode fonts suitable for working with Pali.
|
Example (in “Normyn” font): |
|
|
Readability: |
Excellent. |
|
Phonetics: |
Excellent. |
|
Ease of use: |
Variable |
|
Portability: |
Poor. |
|
Overall: |
Excellent |
|
Uses: |
Printing. |
Method 7. Unicode and Unicode fonts
Unicode
has emerged in recent years as the international standard for representing
characters from most of the world’s alphabets. All the special characters we
need for Pali transliteration may be found in Unicode’s Latin Extended-A, and Latin Extended Additional code charts. They
can therefore be easily generated using HTML, provided that your web browser
uses a Unicode-savvy font.
There
are many Unicode fonts available that contain the characters needed for Pali.
Two useful sources are the Association of Insight Meditation’s ” Pali
Font Resources” and BuddaSasana’s ” Unicode Fonts for Romanized
Viet-Pali-Sanskrit“
The
following table lists the HTML Unicode entities required to generate each of
the special Pali characters. If your web browser supports Unicode, the
characters appearing in the last column of the table should resemble those
appearing the shaded column. If they do not match, then you may have to upgrade
your web browser, install Unicode fonts on your computer, or both. For details
about configuring your computer and browser to use Unicode, see the Unicode
website.
|
Pali letter |
Velthuis |
HTML |
Rendered on your browser as[3] |
|
|
A macron |
|
AA |
Ā |
Ā |
|
|
aa |
ā |
ā |
|
|
I macron |
|
II |
Ī |
Ī |
|
|
ii |
ī |
ī |
|
|
U macron |
|
UU |
Ū |
Ū |
|
|
uu |
ū |
ū |
|
|
N dot-over |
|
“N |
Ṅ |
Ṅ |
|
|
“n |
ṅ |
ṅ |
|
|
M dot-under |
|
.M |
Ṃ |
Ṃ |
|
|
.m |
ṃ |
ṃ |
|
|
N tilde |
|
~N |
Ñ |
Ñ |
|
|
~n |
ñ |
ñ |
|
|
T dot-under |
|
.T |
Ṭ |
Ṭ |
|
|
.t |
ṭ |
ṭ |
|
|
D dot-under |
|
.D |
Ḍ |
Ḍ |
|
|
.d |
ḍ |
ḍ |
|
|
N dot-under |
|
.N |
Ṇ |
Ṇ |
|
|
.n |
ṇ |
ṇ |
|
|
L dot-under |
|
.L |
Ḷ |
Ḷ |
|
|
.l |
ḷ |
ḷ |
|
|
Examples: |
pānātipātā itihidaṁ |
|
Readability: |
Excellent |
|
Phonetics: |
Excellent |
|
Ease of use: |
Poor-Good, |
|
Portability: |
Good-Excellent. |
|
Overall: |
Good. |
|
Uses: |
Web, |
There
are quite a few Pali books out there, but so far none surpasses the breadth and
depth of A.K. Warder’s superb Introduction to Pali. de Silva’s Pali
Primer, a relative newcomer to the Pali textbook scene, offers a light and
refreshing complement to the high-density Warder. If you’re trying to learn
Pali on your own, it can be helpful to have several books to turn to, as each
offers its unique perspective on the language.
- Introduction
to Pali, by A.K. Warder
London: Pali Text Society, 1963; rev. 1991
464pp, with exercises.
About $15 from Pariyatti. Companion
audio CD also available.
Known popularly as “Warder,” this is the standard Pali textbook
widely used today. It is systematic and thorough, ideally suited to those
with some prior familiarity with basic linguistic concepts (case,
declension, gender, etc.) or to the motivated newcomer. Although beginners
may at first find some of Warder’s explanations impenetrable, it’s still
the best overall Pali textbook around.
The companion CD is well worth purchasing, as it gives the
student a good idea of what “real” spoken Pali should sound like.
Although each chapter contains numerous exercises or
passages for reading and translation, the latest edition contains answers to
only the first seven exercises. Several independently prepared answer keys are
currently available:
- “Answer
Key to Warder’s Introduction to Pali” (John Kelly)
covers the Pali-to-English, English-to-Pali, and “passages for
reading” exercises, in both literal and fluent translations, for
chapters 7-21. - “A
Key to the Exercises in A.K. Warder’s Introduction to Pali” (Brahmali
Bhikkhu) provides meticulously annotated answers to the Pali-to-English,
English-to-Pali, and “passages for reading” exercises for
chapters 7-30. - The Pali Text
Society website also offers answers
to English-to-Pali Exercises 7-30.
Primer, by Lily de
Silva
Igatpuri, India: Vipassana Research Institute, 1994
154pp.
Vipassana Research Institute
Dhammagiri
Igatpuri 422403
Maharashtra, India
Available by mail order via the Pariyatti
Book Service.
This is a nice first book for those who think they’re not ready yet for Warder. Each chapter
focuses on a single concept of Pali grammar, and contains numerous
exercises. I found, though, that there comes a point in the book
(somewhere around Lesson 11) when the brief grammatical introductions in
the beginning of the lessons begin to fall short. In particular, there is
no explanation of word order in Pali sentences. At this point, Warder can come to the
rescue. An Appendix to the book, containing solutions to the exercises, is
reportedly forthcoming from the publisher.
Buddhist Texts: An Introductory Reader and Grammar (formerly titled: Pali
Buddhist Texts Explained to the Beginner), by Rune E.A. Johansson
Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies Monograph Series, No. 14. London:
Routledge/Curzon, 1998
160pp.
This book consists of 52 short chapters, each consisting of a brief
passage from the Pali canon along with a word-for-word grammatical
analysis and translation. Useful to the student with some prior grasp of
the fundamentals of Pali, or when used in parallel with Warder (above). It
also stands well on its own for newcomers who wish to develop a
“feel” for the language. An excellent 25-page summary of Pali
grammar appears in the back of the book. The book has been difficult to
find in the US lately, although it has surfaced in bookshops in Britain
and Asia. If you can’t find it, write to the publisher: Scandinavian
Institute of Asian Studies, Kejsergade 2, DK-1155 Copenhagen K.
Reading Pali: Entering the Word of the Buddha
New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1998
207pp. ISBN 81-208-1440-1 cloth, 81-208-1441-x paper. About $20.
I haven’t seen this one yet, although I’ve heard several favorable reports
about it. From the dust jacket (courtesy of Henry Grossi):
This book is intended to serve as an introduction to the
reading of Pali texts. For that purpose it uses authentic readings especially
compiled for the purpose drawn largely from Theravada canonical works, both
prose and poetry. The readings are in Roman script, and carefully graded for
difficulty, but they have also been selected so that each of them is a
meaningful and complete reading in itself, so as to introduce some basic
concepts and ways of thought of Theravada Buddhism. This book thus offers an opportunity
to become acquainted with the ways in which the teachings of the Buddha are
embodied in the language; a sense that is impossible to determine from English
translations. The book contains 12 lessons. Each of them has three parts: (1) a
set of basic readings and an accompanying glossary, (2) grammatical notes on
the forms of the lesson, and (3) a set of further readings with its own
glossary. The further readings introduce no new grammatical points, but
reinforce ones already presented and give further practice in them. The work
concludes, fittingly, with the Buddha’s first sermon, The Dhammacakkappavattana
Sutta. A cumulative glossary and index to the grammar is also provided.
- An Elementary
Pali Course,
by Narada Thera
Second edition, 1952.
Several on-line
versions
are available. - The New Pali
Course — Parts I & II, by A.P. Buddhadatta
1937; 268pp.
Available for about $4 + shipping from the Buddhist
Cultural Centre,
Sri Lanka.
Topics are arranged systematically in short, digestible chunks (e.g.,
“The Alphabet,” “Pronunciation,” “Parts of
Speech”). Sometimes more explanation would be helpful. Lots of good
exercises, but no answers are given. This would work best in a teacher-led
course, rather than as a tool for self-study. - Pali Language by E. Muller
Delhi: Bharatiya Book Corporation, 1986
144pp. Available at bookstores in Asia.
A compact grammar, written in 1884. Sanksrit students may find it useful,
as it compares and contrasts Pali and Sanskrit at every turn. Not
recommended for the rank beginner. - A Pali Grammar, by N.C.
Vidyabhushan and M.K. Ghose
Calcutta: Kiron Moy Ghose, 1982
90pp. Available at bookstores in Asia.
Another Pali grammar, similar to The New Pali Course, above, but
without any exercises. Useful as a compact reference book after you’ve
learned the basics.
- Buddhist
Dictionary,
by Nyanatiloka Thera
Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society, 1988
260pp. About $20, from Pariyatti
Book Service,
and the Buddhist
Publication Society.
This one is a classic. It’s a fascinating mixture of Pali and English
words, arranged in English word order (e.g., “Killing… Kiñcana…
Kiriya… Knowledge…”). Most entries have thorough explanations
with references to passages in the Pali canon. Excellent tool for beginner
and veteran, alike. - Concise
Pali-English Dictionary, by A.P. Buddhadatta
Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1989
295pp. Available by mail from the publisher: Motilal Banarsidass, Bungalow
Road, Jawahar Nagar, Delhi 110 007, India.
Very handy for quickly finding the meaning of a word, without the detailed
grammatical and contextual analysis offered by the Pali-English
Dictionary. - A
Dictionary of Pali (Vol I: A-Kh)
Oxford: Pali Text Society, 2001
778pp. About $50, from Pariyatti
Book Service.
This impressive new dictionary has several improvements over the classic PED, including the
use of Pali quotations from the Canon to illustrate the meaning of words,
instead of simply references to those passages. The publication date for
volume II has not yet been set. - English-Pali
Dictionary,
by A.P. Buddhadatta
London: Pali Text Society, 1979
588pp. $48 through Wisdom
Publications.
What are the various Pali words for “mind”? How do you say
“penknife” in Pali? (!) This handy book can be particularly
valuable when exploring Pali-English translations — your own or others’. - Pali-English
Dictionary
London: Pali Text Society, 1986
754pp. About $40, from Pariyatti
Book Service.
The primary table-top reference tool for the Pali student. Affectionately
known as the PED.
1.
The first of the five
precepts:
“I undertake the precept to refrain from taking life.”
2.
The last line of the
Buddha’s first sermon (SN 56.11): “And that is
how Ven. Kondañña acquired the name Añña-Kondañña — Kondañña who knows.”
3.
These characters will
display properly only when your browser is set with a default font that
contains appropriate Pali Unicode characters.