One of the common words in Indic for “Mother Earth” is dharaṇī, literally the “bearer”, a word also used for pregnant women.
Dharaṇī seems to be found in only two places in early Pali. In Thag 1.50, I had previously translated it as “mother earth”. Norman has:
The earth is sprinkled
The use of passive voice here is puzzling. The line is straightforward, if obscured by word order and line breaks:
Dharaṇī ca siñcati
Dharaṇī pours
vāti Māluto
gale blows
vijjutā carati nabhe
lightning flashes across the sky
Of course, the earth cannot pour, it is poured upon, thus Norman’s translation goes against the grammar. Not only is the passive voice unjustified grammatically, it’s also bad poetry, as the force of the line is to emphasize the active and turbulent skies of a tropical storm.
But while dharaṇī does not appear elsewhere in early Pali as the “earth”, she does appear as a celestial lake in the mythical north (DN 32:7.48).
There is a lake there too named Dharaṇī
whence the clouds rain forth,
and the rains disperse.
Obviously the reference in Thag 1.50 must be to the same lake, who “pours forth”. It’s a natural idea to think that the rain must come from a giant lake in the sky.
Note too that in this little line, the poetic term māluta is used. This is from the maruta, the group of boisterous gods of the Rig Veda who buffet the sky during thunderstorms, i.e. “gales”.
It’s only a small detail, of course, but it does show the limits of the purely linguistic approach used by Norman. By taking too little account of the mythological context, he not only weakened the poetry of the line, but was forced to translate against the grammar.
