I do like a challenge. There’s a verse in the Āṭānāṭiyasutta that resists easy analysis, containing multiple words that are often assumed to be meaningless, corrupt, or onomatopoeic. I recently made a few remarks on this. This post partly reiterates the former one.
I’ve done a bit more work on it and I think we can resolve the issues satisfactorily. It’s a series of terms with the general sense of “shining”, describing celestial divinities, i.e. stars or other heavenly bodies.
The verse is as follows:
Paccesanto pakāsenti,
Tatolā, Tattalā, Tatotalā,
Ojasi, Tejasi, Tatojasi,
Sūro rājā ariṭṭho nemi.
The commentary explains “searching” (paccesanto) as investigating the meaning of the teachings. It then takes pakāsenti as “explain”: the spirits of the nation explain the teaching to spirits who are gatekeepers, who then explain it to the king. The terms below are the names of these spirits. This explanation is not convincing, but in lack of a better one, translators have often simply rendered the commentary.
However, pakāsenti also means “shine”, and several, perhaps all, of the names below are associated with solar or celestial phenomena. I think the phrase is a poetic description of the celestial bodies that shine as they search across the sky. The first line, then, should be, “Searching, they shine”.
This verse is especially obscure, and any explanation is speculative, but below I offer an analysis under the assumption that the names are shining celestial bodies.
In such cases, best practice is to start by focusing on what is knowable. Tejasi means “brilliant one” (it is used of the sun at Praśna Upaniṣad 5.5). Its neighbor ojasi probably has a similar meaning, so we should take oja in the sense “luster”—attested in Sanskrit but not otherwise in Pali—rather than the more familiar “food, nutritive essence” (MN 36:27.5), yielding “lustrous one”.
For the last line, per my note, these are a set of associated solar names. Ariṭṭha and Nemi appear compounded in Sanskrit, Ariṣṭanemi, which evokes the powerful chariot of a conqueror (“indestructible rim”, Rig Veda 1.89.6, 1.180.10, 3.53.17, 10.178.1). It was the name of the 22nd Jain tīrthaṅkara, and in Brahmanical texts of several figures, including a dragon (Mahābhārata 1.59.39a, 1114.62a, etc.) and an Asura king (Bhāgavatapurāṇa 8.6.31, 8.10.10). Along with the divine steed Tārkṣya, he is associated with Garuḍa, and was probably originally an epithet for the unstoppable wheel of the Sun, Sūra. This line, then, while a simple list of four names in Pali, appears to be a fragmented memory of a Vedic conception which might be translated: “King Sun, (the wheel) of indestructible rim”.
We are left with the line Tatolā, Tattalā, Tatotalā, and also Tatojasi in the third line, which seems related.
Tato is a common pronoun meaning “from there”. The use of pronouns of distance to describe the sun and other celestial bodies is highly characteristic of the Vedic idiom, often rendered by translators as “yonder”, and typically employing the pronoun adas:
- Let not, o gods, yonder sun fall down
- The five oxen that stand yonder in the middle of great heaven
- Those (waters) yonder that are close to the sun
- Yonder Bears [=stars of Ursa Major], set on high, are visible at night
- The path that is yonder, belonging to the Ādityas
The same idiom continues in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad too. This shows that there was a strong sense that the heavenly bodies were “over there”, and that a simple pronoun was used to express this.
The suffix -la is perhaps Sanskrit las, “shine, glitter”, found in Pali as the verb lasati. The sense would then be, “one who glitters from afar”, namely the stars or other celestial bodies whose light spans the galaxy to reach us.
Tattala might have tatta in the sense “heated”, i.e. “one who glitters from heat”. Given the context, though, I think it’s more likely this is another pronoun. Either resolve tatra to tatta—a standard shift in Pali, although this specific form is not elsewhere attested so far as I know—yielding the sense “glittering yonder”, or take it as a reduplicated form, “that, that” (cf. Sanskrit tattaddeśīya, “belonging to this or that country”), yielding the sense “glittering here and there”.
Tatotala doubles the pronouns, literally “one who glitters there, from afar”, with the sense, “one who glitters from farther”. Tatojasi would be, “one whose luster shines from afar”.
Note that the second line is phrased in plural, probably indicating the stars, while the third and fourth lines are singular, indicating the sun.
We can now, if we wish, translate the names:
Searching, they shine:
the Ones Who Glitter From Afar, the Ones Who Glitter Yonder, the Ones Who Glitter From Farther;
the Lustrous One, the Brilliant One, the One Whose Luster Shines From Afar;
the Heroic Sun, the King, the Indestructible Wheel Rim.
