John Kelly’s Pāli 2025 (G&K) Class 21

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Thread for John Kelly’s Pāli 2025 (G&K) Class 21 for the class on December 7th/8th 2025.

Meeting ID: 829 5896 1475
Passcode: anicca

You will need to remain in the “waiting room” until host lets you in.

Homework preparation for this class:

  1. Study the grammatical material in G&K Lesson 11 (pp.152-156)
  2. Study the vocabulary for the first set of readings in Lesson 11 (pp.149-152)
  3. Complete the first set of readings from Lesson 11 (pp.147-149).

** Note: There will be no class on December 21st/22nd, since I will be away. The next class after this one then will be January 4th/5th.

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John, during the class I said that I think I previously got puzzled by something similar to what you pointed out to us in the sentence:

Paccekabuddhe vehāsaṃ abbhuggantvā gacchante bhuṃkaritvā ṭhitassa sunakhassa hadayaṃ phali.

You pointed out, that it is strange, the subject of the sentence is hadayaṃ and that bhuṃkaritvā is weird here, because it probably wasn’t the heart which barked =)

When I spoke about something similar, it was this:

Makkaṭo “karissati nu kho paribhogaṃ, na karissatī”ti olokento, gahetvā nisinnamṃ disvā “kinnukho”ti cintetvā daṇḍakoṭiyaṃ gahetvā parivattetvā olokento aṇḍakāni disvā tāni sanikaṃ apanetvā adāsi.

As I understood the meaning of the sentence, when the monkey offered the honeycomb to the Teacher, it was watching if he will like it, but having seen him having taken it and and just sitting [and not eating honeycomb], it did further actions with the final verb adāsi. If the sentence is explained in this way, then in the chain of absolutives relating to the subject of the sentence—monkey—there’s absolutive gahetvā that relates to the Subject of the previous sentence. Because of that I had hard time making sense of this sentence. Is it different, or I just got it completely wrong? :upside_down_face:

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This indeed is a very tricky Pāli sentence, Tim, and I see your problem.

Makkaṭo “karissati nu kho paribhogaṃ, na karissatī”ti olokento gahetvā nisinnaṃ disvā “kinnukho”ti cintetvā daṇḍakoṭiyaṃ gahetvā parivattetvā olokento aṇḍakāni disvā tāni saṇikaṃ apanetvā adāsi.

The monkey is the main subject of the sentence and is the one doing the looking (olokento) and the one taking the action in almost all the other absolutives prior to the main verb adāsi at the end.

But then we have this embedded clause in bold above gahetvā nisinnaṃ disvā. The monkey is the subject of disvā but then the object of this is the one sitting nisinnaṃ after having taken gahetvā. Does that make sense?

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Yes, I think now I get the difference between these cases. Thank you, John.

Late Pāḷi is so confusing in it’s generous use of absolutives, especially when they try to say so many things in just one go.

And also I think now I can better appreciate the case you brought up about that sentence today.

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Hello @Animitta , @timtim , @Padminidatla , in our class a few days ago covering G&K Lesson 11 we talked about the conditional verb form and how it was different from optative, and the prime example of that came in one of the readings which was an excerpt from the Annatalakkhaṇa sutta.

Just by coincidence, in my readings through the canon I’ve found another good example, SN35.232. Look at the Sujato translation on SC and line up the Pāli with the English side by side: SuttaCentral

After going through in the first part of the sutta talking about how each sense base is not the fetter of it’s object and vice versa, then the sutta says: Cakkhu vā, āvuso, rūpānaṁ saṁyojanaṁ abhavissa, rūpā vā cakkhussa saṁyojanaṁ, nayidaṁ brahmacariyavāso paññāyetha sammā dukkhakkhayāya. [Translation: If the eye were the fetter of sights, or if sights were the fetter of the eye, this living of the spiritual life for the complete ending of suffering would not be found.]

Notice the use of the conditional abhavissa which is clearly stating a counter-factual - the eye is not the fetter of sights, etc.

John

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