Question on the translation of "dukkhanirodhagāminī paṭipadā ariyasaccaṁ"

Q & A
1

Hello @sujato,

This question, of course, relates to Norman’s paper on the grammatical irregularities in SN56.11. My question is more specific. The word paṭipadā is in apposition to ariyasaccaṁ. In English we can’t say that a path is a truth, although we can say that it is true. What is going on grammatically here?

David.

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Hi David, could you help other readers of this thread by providing a link/reference to Norman’s paper? Thanks. :).

It’s a coincidence that I was reading about dukkhanirodhagāminīpaṭipadā in the PTSD within the last hour. Why? This post sent me there to check Dukkhasamudayaṃ, and one thing lead to another:

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:rofl:

Thank you for this! Finally, this mystery is solved … :+1:

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:rofl::joy::rofl: Boom Tish! :joy::rofl::joy:

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Hi @Gillian,
References and links to K. R. Norman’s papers can be found on his Wikipedia’s page.

I was thinking of his paper, The Four Noble Truths.

@misc{norman1982-four-noble-truths,
title={{T}he {F}our {N}oble {T}ruths},
author={K. R. Norman},
booktitle={Indological and Buddhist Studies (Volume in Honor of Professor J.W. de Jong)},
publisher={the Australian National University Press},
address={Canberra},
year=1982,
pages={377–391},
keywords={indian, pali-language},
ranking={rank3},
url={http://www.ahandfulofleaves.org/documents/Articles/The%20Four%20Noble%20Truths_Norman_PTS_2003.pdf}
}

David.

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I just briefly re-read Norman’s paper, and his arguments seem well-founded. It’s not unusual that the most common words or phrases in a language take on a life of their own and occur in ways that defy grammar.

If I understand it correctly, read with Norman as a syntactical compound. That means the “correct” form of the phrase would be, breaking the compound and adding punctuation:

“ayaṁ-dukkha-nirodha-gāminī-paṭipadā”-ariya-saccaṁ
The noble truth that “this is the path leading to the cessation of suffering”.

As Norman says, the different phrasings are too deeply embedded to be “corrected”, even if we could be 100% sure of the correct form (which would be overstating it).

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28 posts were split to a new topic: On Norman’s Paper 'The Four Noble Truths’