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Shri Mahavir Jain Aradhana Kendra
www.kobatirth.orgAcharya Shri Kailashsagarsuri Gyanmandir
ju the Middle Country. The progress of researches into linguistic developments within Buddhist literature has been much hampered in this couutry by a thoughtless and most absurd speculation about what we now call and know as Pāli language on the basis of the identity of the name Pāli with the word Palli meaning a village. This school of philologists quite innocent of the literary history of India, always appear to err on the wrong side. The word Pāli bas never been used in the Ceylonese Chronicles and Buddhaghosa's commentaries in a sense other than the canon as distinguished from the commenaries. The significance of the name Pali or Pasi as denoling the text is that the capon consists of the discourses of the Buddha and those of his disciples, characterised by a connected sequence of thought, (pariyāyena bhāsitam, dhammapariyāyan) having a good beginning, a good middle and a good end. The primary meaning of Palli, Pankti, Pānti or Pāti is no doubt the same. Taken in this sense, Palli denotes a group of houses arranged according to a plan. The Bengali word Parkti' denotes & well-arranged row of seats and Panti' denotes a wellreasoned opinion in a matter of dispute by a body of experts well-versed in the Sõstras. Thus if there is any Beugali word which can be philologically connected with Pāli or Pāļi, it is pāņti in the sense of a well reasoned view, expressed in words.
There is no reason to dispute the tradition, recorded in the Dipavatba, that the literary language of the Buddbist Order until the breaking out of the first schism about a century after Buddha's demise and the formation of the Mabāsargbika School was the same or uniform and that the history of tbe schisms is bound up with a violent tampering with the language and arrangement of the texts. The schismatic developments in language and literature followed two lines deviating from the Sthavira vāda and three recensions of the capon were closed, in about the 2nd Century B.C.--the Sthaviravada canon in a language which is now commonly known As Pāli and the Sautrántika and Mahāsatighika recensions in two types of Mixed
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