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7
The original pair, Pa.14 and 16, Ga. 16-17, with their observation (disvā) of clashing bangles and vain pleasures, and with eko care as the lesson to be drawn from them, are akin to the old Nidarśana figure, notably Bhatti's avagamayann iva paśyataḥ (where the calming of the raging sea is conveying a moral lesson to onlookers). Pa. 15, Ga. 40, on the other hand, is somewhat different. No doubt its first word evam has been utilized by the compilers, as Norman and Salomon suggest, to link this verse with what goes before, but that would not be its original function within the verse. From some quarrel that has been observed (evam), but is not described, one inference is drawn in the first three pādas (evam... mam' assa 'the same would happen to me'), and another in the fourth (eko care).
Besides, the participle pekkhamāno in Pa. 15 is an interloper among the surrounding Pali gerunds. A tendency, common to both versions, to group certain gerundial constructions together may support the claim of the distich Pa. 11-12 to have had a seminal role in the evolution of the text. In Pa. 10-20, almost a dozen gerund-based verses cluster around the distich 11-12 and the disva group Pa. 14-17. In the Gandhari, a group of five that includes the two *diṣpă verses is soon followed by a group of four that includes the distich Pa. 1112. There is another interloper in Pa. 10-20. Pa. 19 is one of the half dozen verses that avoid any syntactic link with the three pādas (vihare... care: its gerund is incidental to the comparison nāgo va). The juxtaposition of Pa. 18-19 will reflect the fact that these verses correspond to Ga. 31-32, and were already paired at an earlier stage of compilation. Otherwise the three syntactic types are fairly randomly distributed in both texts.
Salomon observes a 'pattern of interrelationship and influence' (p.17f.) between the Gandhari text, the Dharmapada
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