Perfect & Periphrastic Perfect

Hello! Pāḷi / Sanskrit grammar question.

In the introductory verse to Ven. Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, there is the line:

deśayāmāsa sambuddhastaṁ vande vadatāṁ varaṁ

I’m curious to see how the Sanskrit line would look if it were converted to Pāḷi.

Apparently, ‘deśayāmāsa’ is a periphrastic perfect, used mainly for verbs with the -aya derivative in the 10th class.

I was wondering if this construction is ever found in Pāḷi? The plain perfect is apparently quite rare, and so if it existed I assume this form would exist in later Pāḷi manuals.

I also wonder if there is a reason why it is deśayām with ‘ś’ rather than ‘s.’ When I look at a Sanskrit conjugation chart for the √dis, it says ‘desayām’ is the indeclinable periphrastic perfect, to which ‘āsa’ is added.

From what I can gather, we would take the nominative form of the word, and then use the perfect conjugation of the root √as to form a periphrastic construction. We could then maybe get ‘desayamāsa.’ In Pāḷi, since the aorist and perfect seem to have merged, maybe this would be ‘āsi’ or even ‘ahosi,’ as in ‘desayamāsi’/‘desayamahosi’? But maybe that is too experimental.

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Here is my Pāḷi-fication of some initial stanzas of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. Very open to corrections! :pray:

anirodhamanuppādaṁ
anucchedamasassataṁ
anekatthamanānatthaṁ
anāgamamaniggamaṁ
yo paṭiccasamuppādaṁ
papañcopasamaṁ sivaṁ
desayāmāsa sambuddho
taṁ vande vadataṁ varaṁ

na sato nāpi parato
na dvebhi na ahetuto
uppannā jātu vijjante
bhāvā kvacana kecana [1]
na hi sabhāvo bhāvānaṁ
paccayādisu vijjate
avijjamāne sabhāve
parabhāvo na vijjate [2]
cattāro paccayā hetu
cālambanamanantaraṁ
tathevādhipateyyañca
paccayo natthi pañcamo [3]
kriyā na paccayavatī
nāpaccayavatī kriyā
paccayā nākriyāvanto
kriyāvanto ca sant’uda [4]
uppajjate paṭicce’me
itī’me paccayā kira
yāva noppajjate ime
tāva nāpaccayā kathaṁ? [5]

So far I’m using the reflexive in Pāḷi rather than the more standard active where it matches the Sanskrit, because it matches the Sanskrit phonetics better which often rhymes. I also did not add a long consonant after yāva or tāva as the Sanskrit original does, as it seems that Pāḷi often (if not always) treats the word as not having a final -t.

Still wondering if ‘desayāmāsa’ should be used by something else in Pāḷi. If someone knows of a solution which is more native to Pāḷi sources that fits the meter, that would be great. So far nothing comes to mind.