Poetic License in the Buddhist Sanskrit Verses of the Upāliparipṛcchā
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Description
Franklin Edgerton in his monumental Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Grammar and Dictionary (BHSGD) proposed a description of Buddhist Sanskrit texts based on the assumption of an original Middle Indic language that underwent a progressive "Sanskritization" in which these middle Indic forms gradually were purged. Edgerton proposes dividing Buddhist Sanskrit texts into three "loosely" chronological layers: in the first group prose sections exhibit as many irregular forms as the verses; in the second group, the verses show evidence of Middle lndo-Aryan forms while the accompanying prose sections are written in generally correct classical Sanskrit; and in the third group are texts whose verses "are substantially as Sanskritized as the prose parts."[1] The Vinaya-viniścaya-upāliparipṛcchā, an early Mahāyānasūtra on monastic discipline, fits the description of Edgerton's second group. Śāriputra, in the first section of the text, asks the Buddha general questions about moral behavior and the Vinaya specialist Upāli asks him more specific questions in the second section. Upāli's final questions ask how Śrāvakas and Bodhisattvas eradicate pride. The Buddha associates the elimination of pride with the repudiation of conceptual attachment to (abhiveśa) dharmas. He explains further in forty four verses the inconceivable and non-dual nature of dharmas.
Candrakīrti quotes sixteen of these forty-four verses in his commentary on Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikāḥ. Candrakīrti uses the scriptural authority of the Buddha to enhance and strengthen his position on the empty and non-dual nature of dharmas. He believes that scriptural authority should be relied upon in situations where perception and inference fail to give certain knowledge about things that are beyond the scope of the senses (parokṣa).[2] Candrakīrti seems to recognize the language ot these sūtra verses as Sanskrit. He comments on their language only once and uses Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī and Patañjali's Mahābhāṣya to explain why in one Samādhirājasūtra verse a case ending appears to be missing and in another a singular verb is used where a plural is expected.[3] In this short paper I will examine the Upāliparipṛcchā verses which be quotes. I will suggest that metrical license accounts for the majority of the Middle lndo Aryan forms found in these verses. The anonymous author of the Upāliparipṛcchā verses uses the same techniques for preserving the meter that we find employed in the composition of Pāli verses. Edgerton argues against comparing Pāli and Buddhist Sanskrit verses. "I frankly have never understood Pāli meter," he confesses, ". . . a great many Pāli verses baffle me."[4] Had A. K. Warder's Pali Metre been available to him he might have bad a different opinion. As Warder observes, Buddhist Sanskrit expands the metrical license already practiced in Pāli.[5] (Lang, introduction, 231–32)
Notes
- Edgerton 1953: XXV
- See his commentary to Catuḥśataka XII.5 in Tillemans, (1990) vol. II, 17.
- See Bronkhorts 1993: 405-406.
- Edgerton 1953: 6 n15.
- Warder, 1967: 74, 78.
