A note for my opponents about Poetry

A standard argument here and elsewhere goes something like this;

A: “I think we can identify early texts in the Pali poetry by metre, the 11 syllable verses are Vedic in character, while the slokas are more Classical”.

B: “This proves nothing, the author of the poem may have simply been employing the poetic technique of “Archaism”, and therefore the poem only looks old, but in fact may not be.”

So far I have seen B nominate a comparison between Tennyson and Dryden, between Ludgate and Chaucer, give the example of Spencer by himself, or simply make the argument without any examples.

As a defender of the “A” stance I have found all of these to be very weak tea so to speak.

Having stumbled across one I wanted to give my opponents a much stronger example that it seems to me has so far (so far as I am aware) not been used.

The Bhagavad Gita in Chapter 11, beginning at verse 15 has a long section of Trishtubhs, that at first glance (I haven’t looked deeply yet) appear to be exactly what the “B” team is looking for, an example in ancient Indian prosody of the conscious use of the Trishtubh metre to sound archaic and “Vedic” but probably composed much later than the Vedic era.

So there you go.

I still don’t find the argument convincing (for other reasons I won’t go into here), but if your looking for a good example of what you are appealing to when you say that maybe that Pali passage just “looks” old, now you have one that is actually from the milieu that is under discussion.

Enjoy!

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Have you waded into Shakespeare authentication as well?
There are some who think someone else wrote all the plays, possibly Edward DeVere.

But I think even the Oxfordians think Spenser wrote Spenser.

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lol!

I have heard that there is a controversy, but you know better than most that as far as “wading in” I am already well over my head in Pali, let alone branching out into renaissance English verse :slight_smile:

I am currently “wading in” about four fathoms deep into the poetry in Pali, prosody being something that has intimidated me more even than grammar, and as per usual I am like a bull in a china shop, but loving it :slight_smile:

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It seems very hard to authenticate Shakespeare sufficiently to Oxfordians, even though Shakespeare lived much more recently than the Buddha, and English is more widely understood than Pali.

I suppose a big question is how we would approach something like Hamlet if it was proven someone else wrote it.

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I mean as a provocation its an interesting question, but in terms of EBT, I guess I am just not that attached to my findings that worry about it too much.

For me, I came to the “EBT” community because I wanted to get at the earliest possible picture of what the buddha taught amongst a mountain of literature that is so vast as to be bordering on the completely incomprehensible.

Arriving here and diving pretty deep into a fairly systematic analysis of the 4 principle prose collections I came to some conclusions about the development of doctrine that I still think make good sense.

Now my impression is that the poetry is susceptible to a similar systematic treatment, and I am, as I say, working it all out as we speak.

I find my picture much more plausible than those who want to claim that the bulk of the doctrinal content of the suttas was taught by the buddha in his lifetime.

But I am certainly not claiming that I am certainly right and they are certainly wrong, although I feel very close to certain that they are wrong.

I just find my picture more plausible and parsimonious with any naturalistic picture of the situation than the opposing view.

I think it is perfectly possible that advanced aliens have us all in vats and everything we think we know is literally a hallucination.

I just think that it’s not a particularly useful idea.

Similarly I think that while it is possible that all the doctrinal content of the suttas where taught by the buddha in his lifetime, I just think that it’s not a very helpful idea whan trying to impose some sort of plausible order on the material.

my imposed order is just that, imposed, but it keeps me happy and busy, so I am happy and busy.

Metta.

Isn’t that a rather fringe theory?

Well, probably not as ‘fringe’ as EBT in the larger Buddhist world.

You can find online a fairly recent debate between (Sir) Jonathan Bate and Alexander Waugh going at it…

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By fringe I mean not much evidence, almost going into conspiracy type thinking. I’ve not followed it in detail though.

SN 1.25 seems to be in the triṣtubh metre.

A better example of a poet perfectly replicating the style of an earlier era and for a long time getting away with it, would be Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770).

After thoroughly digesting John Kersey’s Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum, Chatterton proceeded to turn out verse like this:

… and successfully passed it off as the work of “Thomas Roley”, a supposed 15th century monk. With the exception of Horace Walpole, virtue all English men of letters were taken in by it.

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I love it!

I would note that, as per the Wikipedia article,

“He was able to pass off his work as that of an imaginary 15th-century poet called Thomas Rowley, chiefly because few people at the time were familiar with medieval poetry

The composers of the archaisms of the parayanavagga, atthakavagga and kaggavisanna must have been gifted indeed to intuit how the clever care not to use any terms like four noble truths, five clinging aggregates, noble eightfold paths, twelve links of dependence etc, would trick us moderns like Warder and K.R Norman and basically every Indologist I could find who as ever commented on the matter not wearing a robe, into thinking that they where amongst the oldest in the canon.

I wonder why they they decided to avoid mention of practically every orthodox piece of doctrine of their own religion?

Anyway, I am frankly not sure that it matters much, I am much more interested in convincing myself than convincing others.

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But the relevant point is that the works fooled even many of those who were familiar with mediaeval poetry. Not all of them of course; Johnson and Boswell were perhaps the most notable among the disbelievers. Yet for a time they even fooled Thomas Tyrwhitt, one of the most eminent Chaucerian scholars of the 18th century. Here he is making a plea for the works to be printed:

“The influence of those malignant stars, which so long confined poor Rowley in his iron chest, seems still to predominate. Seriously it were much to be wished, that the gentleman, who is possessed of the still remaining fragments of this unfortunate author, would print them as soon as possible.”

It wasn’t until he brought out the third edition that Tyrwhitt finally realized he’d been hoodwinked.

L. F. Powell, Thomas Tyrwhitt and the Rowley Poems. Review of English Studies. Vol. 7. July 1931:

Powell.pdf (778.9 KB)

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Fundementally i just dont think the idea that multiple parts of the canon are posited to be works of intentional archaism or even forgary very helpful as a hypothesis in explaining the features that differentiate them from other texts.

The three poems i mention, and many of the 11 syllable verses in SN and elsewhere have a completly differnt flavour to the prose, which refers to 2 of the above pieces repeatedly, and is, for this and other reasons familiar to most people interested in the debate, most likely later in temporal order than the aformentioned.

These archaic verses are also, i contend, readily differntiable from the more florid and loquacious examples of the 11 syllable form we see at say Snp3.6 etc.

Taking the idea that the literature of the early buddhists developed over generations, and that in the sutta pitaka we have a large corpus that rewards comparitive study and the tasteful applicationnof good judgment with regard to its periodisation is a helpful way for me to deepen my understanding of the teaching, of realistic pictures of prehistory and textuality, and is just much more fun than comming up with clever new debating tactics and counterexamples to defend the idea that the 4 million odd words of the canon is simply “what the buddha said” in his lifetime, in the preriod prior to the second urbanisation.

And i am too immersed right now in the poetry to be distracted by fascinating episodes from the history of english literature!

:slight_smile:

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OK opponents! I have another example you can break out next time a plucky young upstart comes blustering thier way into your quiet repose :slight_smile:

The Therigatha!

Apparently there are fairly obvious and deliberate Archaisms in the Theri! I can’t quote directly because I can’t be bothered transcribing the OCR pdf I am reading of Warder’s Pali Metre but he asserts, no doubt rightly, that Geiger as early as 1916 pointed out that Theri makes use of “archaic infinitives in -uye and -ase” and are apparently some of the latest works in the canon!!
see footnote 2 Warder Pali Metre p10.

Yet again comrades, it seems like a well informed person might have gently let me know this well established academic fact before I ran my mouth off instead of sending me running after Tennysons and Ludgates :stuck_out_tongue:

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I don’t think whole of Therīgāthā is late, and the language changes quite radically from poem to poem. One can posit the later longer chapters are probably from a later period, as they share more in common with Apadāna in style & in content than with the shorter poems.

However, one example of -uye is in Thig 15.1:

Vissajjito gato so,
Ahampi ekākinī vicintemi;
‘Āpucchitūna gacchaṁ,
Marituye vā pabbajissaṁ vā’.

And another example of -ase in Thig 16.1:

Divase divase tisatti,
Satāni navanavā pateyyuṁ kāyamhi;
Vassasatampi ca ghāto,
Seyyo dukkhassa cevaṁ khayo.

Which are generally held to be later additions, and neither of these forms are found in the earlier parts of Thig, a notable exception being Thig 6.3:

Daharā tvaṁ rūpavatī,
ahampi daharo yuvā;
Pañcaṅgikena turiyena,
ehi kheme ramāmase.

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Thig6.3 is lovely, metrically speaking. The other two… not so much?

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Different people might have spoken in different styles and dialects. To me it would be very strange and suspicious if all the nuns (or monks) would sound exactly the same as one person, use same words, same metre, or whatever. Same for many suttas. Some of them feature words of Buddha’s disciples who were of different caste/background than Him. Of course their words/style of speech would be different.

Your comment doesn’t address the point @Dogen makes though, the argument is not simply that language is “different” it is that it is different in ways that resemble other texts known to be later, like the Apadana.

Similarly the metrical case is that prior to the middle indo-aryan period most of the verse in the vedas was composed in anstup, tristrup, and jagiti, and after the MIA period, most of the verse was composed in sloka. these are different styles and are datable to periods before and after the period we are talking about.

If something walks like a duck, swims like a duck, flys like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s probably not a swan who just wanted to be “different”.

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Why couldn’t those “late” poems have just been translated into (then modern) Pali from their original dialect spoken by those nuns who lived during Buddha Gotama’s time?

Lets suppose that some Therīs lived few centuries after the Buddha. What does this change? Dhamma is timeless. I would listen/read to an advice of an Arahant even if s/he lived centuries after Buddha Gotama. The Truth, Dhamma, isn’t limited to just 5th century BC.

This is entirely possible.
Since there are no ‘original documents’, it’s extremely hard to date any of these texts with much accuracy. In fact, no one seems to know when and if Pali was actually spoken by anyone, and if they were translated into Pali, why.