________________ Ardhamagadhi aya-danda 45 SUMMARY In his Studien zum Suyagada II (pp. 74-76), W.B. Bollee has called attention to the rare word zyadanda (which occurs 6 times in Suy, and nowhere else). Though the old commentaries usually consider it as continuing Sanskrit atma-danda, Bollee rightly points to the affinities between Ardhamagadhi aya-danda and Pali atta-danda ("with uplifted staves", "violent") in which the first part of the compound is the past participle of the verb a-DA (Sanskrit atta). It should be remembered that, in some Eastern variety of Prakrit, aya- could represent any Old Middle Indian form *atta (whether it continues Old Indo-aryan atman or atta). In the present paper the 6 Suy occurrences of ayadanda are scrutinised. From the context it appears clearly that only the meaning "aggressive" was intended in the canonical text, where the word is generally located in the vicinity of near synonyms (-lusaya, -himsaya). Similar patterns are found in the Buddhist tradition (Pali, Buddhist Sanskrit, Gandhari Prakrit). In Pali also, this rare word has sometimes been connected by the commentaries with atta from Sanskrit atman. Nevertheless, the link uniting Pa atta and the verb a-DA has not disappeared altogether, before the old compound atta-danda was completely obsolete, it was renovated, the ancient participle (atta) giving way to the Middle Indo-aryan adinna To sum up: there is no doubt that, already in the old Suyagada, Ardhamagadhi Zyadanda was an archaic term. The rendering atma-danda, usual though it is in the commentaries, is misleading. Of the two translations retained by H. Jacobi (Sacred Books of the East 45), "wicked" and "who work the perdition of their souls", only the first hits the mark: in Suy the word means "aggressive", "destructive". As for the second, which draws attention to the self-damaging consequences of all violence, it can be regarded as an obvious reminder of one of the fundamental tenets of Jainism, in the form of an exegetical gloss.
