Dhammapada

SR No.: 007674
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Max Muller
Publisher: Oxford
Publication Year: 1881
Total Pages: 2540
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 45 MB

Page 636

TEVIGGA SUTTA.
179
side, bound for the other side, should come up, and want to cross over. And he, standing on this bank, should invoke the further bank, and say, “Come hither, O further bank! come over to this side !"
priate that a copyist, and especially a Burmese copyist, would naturally read a doubtful combination as tth; so that even if all Burmese MSS. spell this word with tth (which is by no means certain), very little reliance should be placed upon the fact. On the other hand, the distinction in Sinhalese between tt and tth is very marked (doo and ), and the Sinhalese MSS. all read tt. I think therefore that Childers was right in finally adopting samatittikä as the correct Pâli form. In the numerous words in which Buddhist Sanskrit has a form differing in a way which sets philological rules at defiance from the corresponding Pâli form, Childers thought (see Dict. p. xi, where the list of words might be greatly extended) that the Sanskrit was always derived from the Pali, and the Sanskrit writers had merely blundered. I venture, with great diffidence, to doubt this. It seems more likely that, at least in many instances, both Pâli and Sanskrit were alike derived from a previous Prâkrit form, and that in differently interpreting a difficult word, both Sanskrit and Pâli authors made mistakes. That may be the case here ; and it is almost certain that the original word had nothing to do with tîrtha. How easily this idea could be adopted we see from the fact that Childers when first editing the MSS. (in the J. R. A. S. for 1874), and when he had only Sinhalese MSS. then before him, altered their reading into samatitthikâ, and put this form into his Dictionary; though he afterwards in the separate edition), and after noting that reading in the Phayre MS., chose the other. But what, after all, does having equal or level tîrthas or landing-places' mean, when spoken of a river? Comp. Samatittik am bhungâmi (Mil. 213, 214); Sabbato tittam pokkharanim (Gât. I, 339, text tittham); and Samatittiko tela patto (ibid. 393, text 'iyo, but see p. 400). The root perhaps is tr/P.
Kâkapeyya, according to Buddhaghosa, would mean crowdrinkable.' Crows do not drink on the wing; and they could stand to drink either when a river actually overflowed its banks and formed shallows on the adjoining land; or when in the hot season it had formed shallows in its own bed. Crow-drinkable' might mean therefore just as well 'shallow' as 'overflowing.' Had the word originally anything to do with kâka after all ?
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