Important announcement about the Pāli class
There will be no class next week, 31 March (or 1 April), due to that being the Easter weekend.
Definitely class is on tomorrow, and I hope to see most of you then.
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Oh yay! Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi will be teaching a weekend retreat here in NYC, so I was worried about rushing back for class 
Do the words evaṃ and yathayidaṃ have some kind of connected meaning. " thus … like this." or “so much … as this”? I mean when they appear in two different clauses of a sentence. Somehow it seems like they are working together to express a comparison. For example:
“Nāhaṁ, bhikkhave, aññaṁ ekarūpampi samanupassāmi yaṁ evaṁ purisassa cittaṁ pariyādāya tiṭṭhati yathayidaṁ, bhikkhave, itthirūpaṁ. (“Monks, I do not see even a single sight which so obsesses a man’s mind and persists, as this: the sight of a woman”)
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Yes, Ayya, they are indeed in this particular formulaic configuration which is repeated often in the G&K readings from Lesson I.
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Beth’s chicken-scratch method for translating the first “Further Reading”:
N’ahaṃ, bhikkhave, aññaṃ ekadhammaṃ pi samanupassāmi yo evaṃ saddhammassa sammosāya antaradhānāya saṃvattati yathayidaṃ, bhikkhave, pamādo. (AN 1.114)
Step 1: Re-arrange the puzzle
Put all verbs at the top.
Figure out who or what is the subject, if possible.
Put all object nouns next.
Put all adjectives next.
Put any enclitics & vocatives last.
samanupassāmi (I don’t see)
saṃvattati (leads to)
aññaṃ ekadhammaṃ (a single mental quality)
yo (which – demonstrative pronoun)
saddhammassa (true doctrine)
antaradhānāya (fading away of)
sammosāya (forgetting / confusion)
pamādo (negligence)
pi (even / just)
evaṃ (thus)
yathayidaṃ (that is to say)
bhikkhave (hey there, monks!)
Step 2: Re-arrange the puzzle again to make sense
samanupassāmi (I don’t see)
aññaṃ ekadhammaṃ (a single mental quality)
yo (which – demonstrative pronoun)
evaṃ (thus)
saṃvattati (leads to)
antaradhānāya (fading away of)
sammosāya (forgetting / confusion)
saddhammassa (true doctrine)
yathayidaṃ (that is to say)
pamādo (negligence)
pi (even / just)
bhikkhave (hey there, monks!)
Step 3: Finalize with any remaining vocatives & enclitics
Listen up, monks: I don’t see even one single mental quality comparable to negligence which leads to the fading away and forgetting of the true doctrine!
Then I look to see if I came close to the answer key. Hmmm…let’s see.
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Here are the Powerpoint slides from Class 3 today -
SC Pali 2024 Slides Class 3.pdf (522.0 KB)
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Since we yesterday learnt that the genitive in Pali refers to the noun that comes after it, just like in English, another way to try to make sense of this sentence is to replace the ānaṃ with 's on the last ānaṃ:
the anuppanna pāpaka akusala dhamma’s anuppādāya
anuppādo means ‘not arising’ – so at first glance at least it makes sense to speak of the dhamma’s non-arising-ness.
-dāya means anuppādo has to be in the genitive case, so it needs the thing that’s done for or to it to make sense. Just like “I generate effort for work” sounds odd without ‘I generate effort’ (unless that’s your battle cry when you enter the office in the morning!)
The thing that’s done for the anuppāda is the chandaṃ janeti, a humble verb with a noun in the accusative.
So you get something like 'the unarisen, bad, unskillful dhamma’s non-arising, for [this], chanda s/he generates ’
From here it’s easy to parse it to better sounding English. Anyway, I like doing it this way 
(someone please correct me if this is wrong tho 
)
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That all looks ok to me.
If one takes the sentence in reverse order starting from the verb, it’s probably easier to form an English sentence.
one generates/ desire/ for the non arising/ of dhammas/ (which are) unwholesome/ evil/ unarisen
Perhaps this is helpful.
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Happy to hear you’ve found a method that you like! The more we can “huddle” in these threads to see different approaches, the better IMO.
I like to feel that I have company in this learning process. I enjoy hearing other people’s translations during the zoom class … the sense that we’re working it out with John real-time and not having to get it perfect. I always do the homework in advance but often keep some of my translation work out-of-reach so that I can practice “working it out” again with everyone on the zoom.
In G&K we jump right into the deep end of the swimming pool with quite lengthy sentences. Because of this, I’m finding immediate reward in learning some of the standard doctrinal statements in pāli beginning in Chapter 1. This, decidedly, was not the case with Warder’s book (although I appreciated Warder’s approach for other reasons.)
As the translation work gets even heavier in Chapter 2 and forward, my mind is coalescing around the verb-first method that Stephen just mentioned. I’m less concerned (right now) with breaking down the noun & adjective declensions perfectly except to nail down intrinsic meaning.
Otherwise I might feel overwhelmed 
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I always advocate for the ‘three line’ approach:
-write out the original Pali sentence
-under each word give as much information as possible- lexical meaning, case number gender, tense, etc
-below this give a natural sounding English translation.
If it seems overly challenging to form a meaningful English sentence, rely on a (literal as possible) published translation. It’s fine for a while to see how one equals the other, without doing all the ‘unscrambling’ yourself.
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Posting my potentially embarrassing drafting work, because I haven’t seen the trilinear translations formatted this way, so it might be helpful to someone. Using a spreadsheet app, i.e. Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel, so I can move boxes around, highlight groups boxes, etc.
seeing words as boxes, and clauses as bigger boxes, helped to group words and parse out “blocks” of meaning, like this:
And when I couldn’t decide between a case or a gender, to list them all, and and see what emerges after looking up all of them. (hence, DATGEN & NOMVOC for ambiguous words) And multiple options for the definition of a word, and then seeing what makes sense it context. (although - despite this, I settled on yesterday’s multiple renderings of dhamma as “Bhikkhus, for one of wrong view, unwholesome, unarisen doctrines arise, and are conducive to the full development of arisen, unwholesome phenomena, as well.” 
)
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My apologies for missing yesterday’s class.
Where do I access a recording of the class?
I am very much enjoying working through the Gair and Karunatillake grammar. Thank you for offering this course!
Wow! This is totally efficient and really allows for moving things around. Hmmm…would force me to keep working with Excel 
@stephen I eventually started doing this in Word, for the Warder course, which was quite helpful. I decided I just needed to print it so I could do the “visual word-info thing” and not feel guilty about it (the trees). That’s how I review those exercises even now (via the hard copy I printed and wrote on).
As we started G&K, I was trying to get around it (the printing) but I think this is the only way for me. It helps that I’m a super-fast typer … when I took typing as a 15-year-old, they wouldn’t let us look at the keys 
(that’s what you get with a Roman Catholic education).
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You can send a message requesting access to the recordings to @Sumana. She kindly takes care of that side of things.
Since early days learning Pāli, I too have always been a fan of this “trilinear” approach, and encouraged Bhikkhu Bodhi in using that when he was discussing with me his ideas for the book Reading the Buddha’s Discourses in Pāli.
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Just to express my gratitude to Beth, Erika, Stephen, Karuna, John and all for sharing your thoughts on how to analyse a Pali sentence. So inspiring and motivating. Thank you so much. Mickey
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Thanks, Mickey - glad it could be of use. LMK if you have any questions on my spreadsheet parsing - I didn’t want to get too detailed in an already long post.
The main gist being that - the monstrously long sentences stop being 50 Pāli words floating in white space once you draw boxes around things. So using Excel’s Fill feature, or Borders feature, to start grouping small relationships - a nominative+ accusative, a adjective+noun, a genitive subject + object, etc. and if it’s more complex, separating clauses by row.
For me, that function + having a word, its definition, and its case/gender/number/tense all neatly lined up in the same column has been hugely helpful. Especially with so many situations where a word could be one of several definitions (dhamma being the most ubiquitous one) or case (cittaṃ could be either NOM or ACC) and of dative/genitive for everything - having all the options gathered together in a column really helps.
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Regarding the translation of Dhammapada verses, the students at Dhammadharini collected resources on this which I shall share shortly. This great article shows how many of the modern translations are affected by non-Buddhist ideas: PETER GERARD FRIEDLANDER
Dhammapada Traditions and Translations. It’s readily findable online.
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Thank you for this suggestion. This is actually a very helpful way to go about practicing the translations.
Dhp 182 my translation:
A human birth is hard to get;
it’s hard for men to get a livelihood.
It’s hard to hear the teaching of the True Dhamma;
The arising of awakened ones is difficult.
The Dhammapada translation by John Ross Carter and Mahinda Palihawadana has the commentarial explanations of the word meanings. It explains, " The life of mortals is hard because it lasts only a short time, even though one’s livelihood is [somehow] contrived, having engaged in constant [activity] such as agriculture, and so forth.".
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