The guide (Netti-Ppakaraṇaṁ): according to Kaccāna Thera PDF
Preview The guide (Netti-Ppakaraṇaṁ): according to Kaccāna Thera
PALI TEXT SOCIETY THE [GUIDE NANAMOLI 1977 THE GUIDE Pali Geyt Society TRANSLATION SERIES, NO. 33 THE GUIDE (NETTI-PPAKARANAM) ACCORDING TO KACCANA THERA TRANSLATED FROM THE PALI BY BHIKKHU NANAMOLI Published by THE PALI TEXT SOCIETY, LONDON Distributed by ROUTLEDGE & KEGAN PAUL LTD. LONDON, HENLEY AND BOSTON 1977 First published . . . 1962 Reprinted . . . .. 1977 ISBN 0 7100 8576 1 © PALI TEXT SOCIETY PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY UNWIN BROTHERS LIMITED THE GRESHAM PRESS, OLD WOKING, SURREY, ENGLAND A MEMBER OF THE STAPLES PRINTING GROUP GENERAL CONTENTS PAGE TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION - - - ii v 1. The Guide (Nettippakararia) - - - -- vii 2. Editions of the Text - x 3. History and Authorship x 4. Date ii x 5. The Nettippakarana and Petakopadesa compared - xiii 6. Authorship and Date reconsidered - xxvi 7. The Form of the Guide and its Method in Outline - xxix 8. Renderings of the Guide's Technical Terms - - xxxiii 9. The Method: its Practical Use: Discussion - - xliii 10. The Pali Commentaries' Debt to the Guide - - liii 11. Quotations in the Guide lv 12. Some peculiar minor Features - lvi 13. The Guide and Indian Methods of Exegesis - - lix 14. Renderings of Technical Sutta and other Terms - lix 15. General - - - - - - -- km TEXTS USED lxv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS - - - - - - lxvii DETAILED CONTENTS OF THE GUIDE - - - lxix THE GUIDE A. COMPREHENSIVE SECTION - - - - -- 3 B. SPECIFICATION SECTION - - - - -- 5 Part I. 1. Indicative Subsection - 5 Part II. 2. Demonstrative Subsection - 8 3. Counter-demonstrative Subsection - - 13 v vi General Contents PAGE Part III. Chapter i. 16 Modes of Conveying in Separate Treatment - - - - 13 Part IV. Chapter ii. 16 Modes of Conveying in Com bined Treatment 119 Part V. Chapter iii. The Moulding of the Guide-Lines 148 Part VI. Chapter iv. The Pattern of the Dispensation - 173 INDEXES I. General Index (English-Pali) - - - -- 253 II. List of Similes 283 III. List of Quotations - 283 IV. Glossary (Pali-English) 288 APPENDIX 308 TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION 1. THE GUIDE The book here translated—as it stands, it was perhaps composed more than two thousand years ago—sets forth a method intended for the guidance of those who already know intellectually the Buddha's teaching and want to explain his utterances. It is not a commentary but a guide for commentators: it deals with scaffolding, not with architecture. Its name, Nettippakarana, means 'guide- treatise', but the translation has been called, more simply, the Guide. There are two recognized aspects of language, which are comple mentary, that is to say the Normative and the Contextual. Of the normative theory of language the familiar characteristic product is Grammar, which fixes the forms of words in a given language and the rules for their formal association. Subordinating ideas to words, it tacitly assumes that the correct meanings of known words can, if not yet ascertained, inherently all be defined un equivocally in the Dictionary.1 There words (with their rules) figure as the keys to ideas regarded as named by them, and contexts are thus relegated to a mere matter of style. But the Guide disposes of Grammar in one sub-heading (§186) and the Dictionary in one heading (Mode 11, 'Synonyms'). It cannot be called even a 'hermeneutic grammar'. Grammar seeks to govern all ideas through words. 'Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of them selves': but sometimes to be 'sense-wise' is to be 'sound-foolish'. Words have, in their use, a notorious ambivalence which remains always beyond the power of the Grammar and the Dictionary fully to control. However precisely defined, they still retain that element of inherent ambiguity (not vagueness), in virtue of which, for a specially outstanding example, metaphor is not only possible but necessary for a language to live, and a language—even a 'dead' 1 While Panini fixed the grammar of Sanskrit in the first centuries B.C., the earliest extant Pali grammar is the Kaccdyanappahararva, traditionally attributed to the Buddha's pupil Maha-Kaccayana Thera but according to Western scholarship composed sometime after the beginning of the 5th century A.C. The first Pali dictionary is the AbhidhdnappadipiJcd compiled by Moggallana Thera in Ceylon in the 12th century A.C. Vli viii The Guide language—lives when it is used. A contextual theory of language recognizes use in contexts as an essential (ad hoc) denning element of words, as representing ideas and here subordinate to them. But contexts, theoretically unlimited, are limited arbitrarily in fact by the necessary conventions of usage in communication; and usage, as well as being thus arbitrary in the limitations it has to impose, is subject both to caprice and to change (this aspect of language must be essentially statistical). Properly the Guide—as we evaluate it now—belongs here; for, as it will appear later, the task it has set itself is simply that of showing compendious ways of eliciting from a given individual textual passage the implications that the very bulky contexts of a teaching as a whole both allow and require. Therein it is concerned with a particular usage. It seeks to promote correct wordings of known meanings and to prevent deviations creeping into such re-wording as a commentary in that usage must involve. And the devices it employs for this purpose are, in fact, nothing other than 'contextual types' chosen to suggest the desired implications, these 'contextual types' being set out in the form of the 16 Modes of Conveying (a communication) and the 5 Guide-Lines (to the verbal expression of the Pitafoi-teaching's meaning-as-aim, namely 'liberation' in whatever way expressed). The Guide seeks to control words through known ideas. Two kinds of use of language can be distinguished. One extends to describing, gathering evidence, exploiting, commenting, drawing conclusions, and so on; it is oriented to the discovery of some thing new. The other seeks to exercise the ideas so discovered while at the same time preserving them intact and preventing their change and loss. It seeks consistency and is averted from what is new. Regarded in this light, the Guide belongs under the second kind. It deduces nothing and concludes nothing. It simply draws from the Suttas (more or less directly in each case) 16 contextual type- situations and 5 verbal lines converging on the Suttas' meaning-as- aim. From such an apparatus nothing could, in fact, be deduced or concluded. It can only facilitate re-wording of the ideas already expressed in the Suttas. And that is what it sets out to do. All the many passages of a commentarial or definitive nature in its exemplification are incidental to its main purpose, which is one reason why its definitions of words are always ad hoc and often multiple and variant. Its elements (Sect. 7b) and how they are exemplified must be clearly distinguished. Translator's Introduction ix Commenting, like translating, consists in the re-wording of an idea. (And words are related to their meanings and to each other by minds.) The ideas to be re-worded should be known clearly to the commentator, as they should to the translator; but when the grammar and the dictionary have supplied all the aid they can, the new wording, whether in the same language or in another, still needs controlling in the matter of the new contexts and the trains of thought it follows and suggests. With Metaphor (and the Pseudo- metaphor or Pun) possible, not only do words tend, in new uses, to suggest and allow to infiltrate after them their own habitual families of contexts that may bring about deviation of the ideas they are intended to re-express, but also it is as well known as it is often forgotten that an individual set of contexts, each with a cipher or a gap—a strange word (an iaj>arimana-j>add>. see §49)—in it, will prompt the mind to supply or form an idea as a 'meaning' to fill the lacuna. So the re-wording of an intellectually known idea without due precautions in regard to this aspect may make a communication different from what was intended, and it can even mislead the would-be commentator, or translator, himself by undermining in his mind the ideas that were intellectually clear to him. Works on the contextual aspect of language are few.2 The present one is a special case; for it is concerned with a particular branch and specifically with the Buddha's teaching. Normally this aspect of language is left to the native wit of the individual to manage as best he can. Its nature must make it much less easy than in the case of Grammar for the theory to emerge from the welter of material in which it is embedded. How far the book— especially the detailed part—has actually succeeded in its purpose must be for the inquirer to decide. It is only not easy going if mistreated as an actual commentary—as an attempt directly to explain ideas in the Buddha's teaching taken as not yet sufficiently clear, or to give demonstrative proof of some conclusion drawn— instead of taking it for what it is, namely a guide for the re-wording of ideas already known. If so mistreated it must seem not only quite procrustean at times but also a capricious mixture of the vague and the obvious, by which almost anything can be proved. But that would be to take it wrongly. Its instructions are, in fact, such 2 RogeVs Thesaurus is the classical English example of this approach to language, with its 'Tabular Synopsis of Categories' ('Plan of Classification') and its avowed objects of finding a word for a meaning already to hand and of suggesting trains of thought.
The list of books you might like
