Pāli

Little is known about the origin of the term pāli (lit. a “line”) or how, in its diffusion from northern India to south-southeastern Asia over the course of several millennia, it came to be synonymous with the language of, and texts comprising, the Theravada canon of Buddhist scriptures. Called Māgadhī, in Buddhist literature the composite language of these texts bears witness to a lengthy and complicated development insofar as they preserve archaic linguistic features associated with several Middle Indo-Aryan vernaculars, known as Prākrit, that appear to have come under the homogenizing influence of Sanskrit, the language of classical Indian culture. Because these dialects are from the northwestern region of India and the itinerant Buddha lived and taught in the northeast, it is not known where Pāli was originally spoken, if at all. Recent developments in Western scholarship surmise that Pāli was never an actual vernacular of India but an artificial language that flourished after the death of the Buddha (ca. fourth century BCE) as an ecclesiastical koiné.

The Pāli canon (Tipitaka) is the oldest and only canon of Buddhist scriptures extant in its entirety in any Indian language. Although no Pāli script was ever developed, these texts were transmitted orally by reciters (bhānaka) from about the fourth or third century BCE onward. Included among the Buddha's disciples or “auditors” (śrāvaka) were prominent monks and nuns who played a vital role in the dissemination of Pali. Around the beginning of the Common Era, with the advent of writing on palm leaves, scribes at Aluvihāra in Sri Lanka initiated the gradual process of transliterating these texts. This was not a massive shift from an oral to a manuscript culture. Indeed, the oral tradition of chanting Pāli was never dispensed with and remains a central feature of monastic life down to the present. It did, however, facilitate a translocal expansion of Buddhist literary production that inspired new possibilities for classification, exegesis, redaction, commentary, chronicle, and narration. The order of magnitude in this shift from practice to literacy and scholarship intensified dramatically in the modern period through print, which gave rise to a new and unprecedented sense of the Pāli canon as “fixed”—that is, as an orderly, continuous, multivolume manuscript of complete texts closed off from other so-called extra canonical or noncanonical texts, including popular vernacular narratives and the commentarial literature with which it has otherwise had a long and intimate association.

[Page 974]While familiarity with and access to the Pāli canon remains preeminently the preserve of elites, which today includes a cosmopolitan network of scholar monks and intellectuals, the vast majority of Buddhists historically and presently have had comparatively little knowledge of or experience with the canon as such. Yet the version printed in roman characters by the Pāli Text Society of London, since 1881, as well as the version recited and settled at the Sixth Council held in Rangoon from May 1954 to May 1956, and subsequently released in 1999 as a CD-ROM edition, have accorded the Pāli canon a form and status hitherto unprecedented in the history of Buddhist cultures.

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