SuttaCentral
I don’t think this is an example of the genitive absolute, actually. The idiomatic expression etad ahosi takes the dative case “This occurred to …”
And in this example Tassa te viññussa sato mahallakassa are all dative, literally “to that you being wise and mature.”
Dear John and all,
I’m still confused about the meaning of the reflexive form of a passive verb. So could you please explain the meaning of the 3 sentences below, especially the difference between the first and the other two:
(1) So haññate. (reflex. sg of haññati) 'He is killed (by?) himself ’ ?
(2) So haññati. ‘He is killed’
(3) So hanate. (reflex. sg of hanati) ‘He kills himself’?
Thank you,
Trung.
Hi, I think it would be easier to discuss these verb forms with the full sentences.
Can you give the sutta references?
Thanks
These are not from suttas. I just don’t understand how a passive verb can also have a reflexive form. For an active verb, that is clear, since So hanati ‘He kills (someone else)’ is very different from So hanate ‘He kills himself’. But for a passive verb, I can’t get how the meaning will change from normal (non-reflexive) So haññati to reflexive So haññate.
In Pāli, sometimes verbs take “reflexive” endings, also known as ‘middle voice’. (attanopada) As Collins writes, “Active and Middle Voice are terms which only rarely indicate differences in meaning. “
In Sanskrit the distinctions are surely more pronounced, but in Pali they are ‘vestigial’ and seem to be used to impart a more literary flavor.
Again, if you can provide a few full sentences from texts that use these forms it could be possible to discuss what shades of meaning might be discerned.
Well explained, Stephen.
Trung, it appears you might be tying yourself up in knots over this a little bit. If you provide example Pāli sentences where the forms you are asking about are used, that would be helpful.
Quoting from NCRP, pp.153-154
I found 8 occurences of haññate in suttacentral. I don’t fully understand all of them, but I feel that the meaning isn’t very different from haññati. Below is one of these instances, but if you think other occurrences might better illustrate the point, please feel free to use those instead.
(Ja 397)
Yathā cāpo ninnamati,
jiyā cāpi nikūjati;
Haññate nūna manojo,
migarājā sakhā mama.
Translation of Francis & Neil:
The bow is bent, the bowstring sounds amain;
Manoja, king of beasts, my friend, is slain.
Thank you Stephen and John for taking your time to read and answer my questions.
Trung.
Thanks for finding this example.
Here we have the verb ‘hanati’ (strike/kill) in the passive form, middle voice.
So instead of the active sense of ‘Manojo kills/strikes’ it’s passive voice- ‘Manojo is struck/killed’.
The reflexive ending does not seem to lend any additional sense to the verb, and was probably chosen to lend a literary flavor.
Also notice the archaic rendering of cāpi (ca + api) ‘and then’, as ‘amain’ , which I believe means ‘forcefully’. (To rhyme with ‘slain’. Rhyme schemes seem absent in Skt/P poetry, but are very important to English poetry. )
So even in the English rendering we find an archaism to lend a literary flavor.
Thank you Stephen for your explanation!
Could you provide any examples (in Pāli, Sanskrit, English or any language) or suggest a hypothetical context where the reflexive form could add additional nuance of meaning to a passive (not active) verb?
I am skeptical that such a case exists. In my view, the fact that a reflexive ending does not add any meaningful sense to a passive verb is universal, regardless of language or context.
Trung.
Yes, this is true. The middle voice (or reflexive form) in Pāli generally adds no meaning and is most often used in poetry. So here haññate means the same as haññati.
For another example, middle form labhate often replaces labhati and has the same meaning.
Today, I listened to B.Bodhi’s teaching on this sentence in his NCRP course, and it somewhat confirmed your points. Below is his translation of the sentence and his explanation:
‘For you being an intelligent matured person, did (it) not occur that: …’
(B.Bodhi) “tassa te ‘for you’. This is a demonstrative pronoun connected to a personal pronoun, that is very common feature in the Pāli suttas. In translation we just drop the demonstrative pronoun and just take the personal pronoun te. This (te) is a dative, and the whole thing is a genitive absolute construction (sato is genitive present participle of atthi).”
I’m still not entirely convinced about the genitive absolute construction here, as his explanation seems to blur the boundary between the genitive and dative cases. However, the DPD entry for etadahosi confirms that it’s used with a dative case:
etadahosi sandhi. (+dat) this (thought) occurred (to) ; lit. this was (for) [etad + ahosi]
I understand that the difference between dative and genitive meanings can be subtle in English, but are these cases truly interchangeable in Pāli grammar?
Trung.
Perhaps you can show how an English language translation would differ between interpreting the grammar as a genitive absolute vs. a straight dative?
Lesson XII Grammar points 4 and 7 might also be helpful.
I’m not convinced either, Trung. I have sent Bhikkhu Bodhi an email to ask him about this. I will you all know when I get his response.
I understand that the difference between dative and genitive meanings can be subtle in English, but are these cases truly interchangeable in Pāli grammar?
In almost all Pāli declensions the genitive and dative share identical forms. But the way I see the grammatical difference between these two cases, in both Pāli and English, is that, in most cases the genitive qualifies a noun as in denoting possession in some way, whereas the dative qualifies a verb and shows the direction of some verbal action to or for some noun.
This is perhaps an over-generalisation but I hope it helps.
Ambho purisa…Tassa te viññussa sato mahallakassa na etadahosi…
Regarding the phrase and its possibility of being labeled a genitive absolute, Wijesekera says this about the construction:
"…there are at least two principal conditions governing the use of the gen. absolute, especially with regard to the character of the subject- and predicate-factors that constitute the absolute clause. Firstly, the substantive is almost always the name of a person (or a personal pronoun), very rarely to be supplied. Secondly, the predicate must have a durative sense, that is, it may be either an ordinary present participle or an adj. or a verbal formation having the value of an adj…
as shown by the parallelism with the loc. absolute, in its simple temporal employment the gen. absolute denotes an action going on or a situation existing at the time when the action of the main clause intervenes. Then it may be rendered by “while” or “as” or the participial construction in English (“this being so …”).
a. Strictly speaking, the construction seems to be limited to the expression of action going on but not cared for while performing the main action. Hence local grammarians denote this nuance by the term anādara, i.e. disregard.
I did send Bhikkhu Bodhi a question about this passage and I got a very nice response.
My question to him.
Lesson XI, Further Readings 1 (p.156)
Tassa te viññussa sato mahallakassa na etadahosi: ‘Aham pi kho’mhi jarādhammo jaraṃ anatīto.
I take all the words prior to na etadahosi as being dative (which is the case that the idiom etad ahosi usually takes). This includes the present participle sato as dative agreeing with the tassa te. Thus with the sense along the lines of “Did it not occur to you being a wise and mature person …?”
But in our class online discussion group one of our students who listened to your NCRP class online says you take viññussa sato mahallakassa as being genitive absolute. I don’t really see how that fits, especially if you take the common meaning of gen abs as “in spite of”. Could you please elaborate?
Bhante responded:
Dear John,
I had earlier misunderstood the genitive absolute. My explanation of the first passage you cite, as a genitive absolute, was incorrect. There may be other clauses elsewhere in “New Course” that I incorrectly explained as genitive absolutes. I later learned that this kind of expression should be taken as dative or genitive (but not a gen. absolute).
In the same email I also asked BB about the the Paccekabuddha and dog story from the Rasavāhini, which occurred earlier in Lesson XI and which we had some discussion about during class.
My question:
And my other question, though quite unrelated, is also in Lesson XI, Initial Readings 1, p. 147, in the Rasv. story about the Paccekabuddha and the dog. In the first paragraph with the PB regularly feeding the dog lumps of rice we have so tena pacekabuddhe sinehaṃ akāsi, where the dog generates affection concerning the PB. No problem.
Then, further down in the story, after the PB tests the dog by deliberately taking the wrong path, and even after the dog tries to show him the right way he tries to remove the dog from blocking the wrong path using his foot, but the dog insists on getting him in the right direction by biting his robe and dragging him.
After this we have the Pāli sentence, Evaṃ so sunakho tasmiṃ paccekabuddhe balavasineham uppādesi. Which I interpreted as “Thus that dog caused to arouse great affection in the paccekabuddha.” That is to say, now the PB has affection for the dog, but again my students say that in your online course you took it as a restatement of the dog having affection for the PB. It seems the Pāli is ambiguous - is the affection aroused concerning the PB or in the PB (in both cases locative). To me my interpretation seems to fit the story arc better since we have the dog having affection for PB earlier on and now this is reciprocated by the PB by the end. It’s hard for me to imagine that the dog is going to become more affectionate to PB after he sees this apparently obtuse human being repeatedly going on the wrong path and then trying to kick him out of the way when the dog was trying to help!
Your thoughts, please.
And Bhante responded:
On the second point you raised, the passage about the paccekabuddha and the dog, you are probably right. The object of affection, lust, etc., typically comes in the locative case, and so I thought the dog became affectionate toward the PB, but the context (as you point out) supports the alternative explanation:
Evaṃ so sunakho tasmiṃ Paccekabuddhe balavasinehaṃ uppādesi.
In such a way that dog aroused in that PB strong affection [toward himself].
Thank you John for having asked B.B to clear out these misunderstandings.
In this sentence, I think the locative paccekabuddhe may not be the object of balavasinehaṃ, but should be connected to uppādesi to make a structure like 'to generate (sth) in sb/sth". I found some examples of this usage:
(Kd17, the story about Devadatta throwing down a stone from a mountain peak to kill Buddha) Tato papatikā uppatitvā bhagavato pāde ruhiraṁ uppādesi.
Horner’s translation: …‘and (only) a fragment of it (the stone), having fallen down, drew blood on the Lord’s foot.’
The verb uppajjati, from which uppādeti is a causative form, is also connected to a locative case as in this frequently used sentence: Idha, brāhmaṇa, tathāgato loke uppajjati arahaṁ sammāsambuddho …
Hello Trung,
It would be more accurate to say that balavasinehaṃ is the direct object of uppādesi, and paccekabuddhe is an indirect object of that same verb.
… to make a structure like 'to generate (sth) in sb/sth"
I have no idea what you mean here. Please explain.
Thank you John for clarifying the grammar terminology. However, I believe paccekabuddhe would correspond more closely to a prepositional phase (‘The dog arouses affection in the P.B’).
From this sentence, along with the example from Kd17 that I mentioned—where it could be translated literally as “Therefore, a fragment (of the stone), having jumped up, generated blood on the foot of the Blessed One”— I inferred that uppādeti with an accusative and locative case structure (uppādeti + acc + loc) could imply ‘generate something in someone/something’.