I’ve mentioned Humpty Dumpty a couple of times recently. I thought I’d share and discuss the source text…
Humpty Dumpty took the book and looked at it carefully. ‘That seems to be done right —’ he began.
‘You’re holding it upside down!’ Alice interrupted.
‘To be sure I was!’ Humpty Dumpty said gaily as she turned it round for him. ‘I thought it looked a little queer. As I was saying, that seems to be done right — though I haven’t time to look it over thoroughly just now — and that shows that there are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents —’
‘Certainly,’ said Alice.
‘And only one for birthday presents, you know. There’s glory for you!’
‘I don’t know what you mean by “glory”,’ Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. ‘Of course you don’t — till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”’
‘But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument”,’ Alice objected.
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’
(Excerpt from Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll.)
This is not mere absurdism. This is a serious issue in linguistics. On what basis do words have meaning? As I have noted several times recently, Buddhists certainly seem to be masters of their own vocabulary. No one can understand us until we tell them what our jargon means.
One of my favourite examples to illustrate this is sankhāra which derives from Sanskrit:saṃskāra. I could write about the morphology of this word, explaining the prefix (saṃ) and the verbal root √kṛ… yadda yadda. But in the end, doing all that tells us nothing about how Buddhists use the word to mean “willed actions”.
To understand how Buddhists use this word one requires a practical knowledge of Vedic culture. The Vedic speakers celebrated a number of rites of passage, e.g. birth, naming, marriage, birth of a first son, death. These rites were called saṃskārāḥ. And each rite consists of a series of ritual actions (karman). Ergo, a saṃskāra is an occasion for performing karma. And this is what saṃskāraskandha means in plain English.
By contrast “the aggregate of mental formations” is not a translation of saṅkhārakkhandha because no native English-speaker could be expected to understand this phrase at face value, nor to arrive at the Buddhist usage (“an occasion for performing karma”) by any logical process. Here “formations” is an attempt to shoehorn the etymology of kāra into the equation and only makes the concept harder to understand.
As I noted last week: no translation from Pāli can be considered a good translation if we have to translate it back into Pāli in order to understand it. “Aggregate of mental formations” still means precisely nothing to me, even after 30 years of eagerly absorbing Buddhist jargon. I understand what purports to represent, since I’m studied the khandhas in very great detail (and published on this topic). But I cannot explain how saṅkhārakkhanda and “aggregate of mental formations” are related because there is no natural relationship between these two concepts.
Not all conceptual thinking about language, especially about the relation of words to the world, involves historical phonology. Unfortunately, etymology is one of those tools that causes every problem to look like an etymology problem. And many of the etymologies I see quoted are speculative, wrong, vague, disputed, or simply irrelevant.
I think we should all take a step back and consider what kind of question demands an etymology as an answer. It’s mainly, “how was a word used in the past?” or “how are these two words in different languages related?” It’s almost never an answer to “how should I translate this word in the present?” And this goes both ways since English words are seldom employed with etymology in mind either (look up the etymology of “nice” for example).
If citing an etymology sheds light on a problem, then by all means cite it. But if citing an etymology is something we do because that’s what “scholars” do, or because that’s our area of interest and we shoehorn it into every discussion, then we should think again.
The danger here is that the ability to give an etymology becomes a barrier to participation. Or a way to show off and cultivate an air of being “scholarly”. (NB: “scholar” is easy to delineate since scholars publish). And anyway, “scholarship” is an ongoing conversation amongst experts rather than a series of isolated declarations.
Readers should be more confident to ask “how do you know?” and “how does this help?” As I have repeated shown in my publications, experts are not infallible. And a PhD is not guarantee of anything. Basic fact checking often exposes flaws in existing scholarship.
We should also be wary of weasel words like “irregular formation”. This is just a fancy way of saying “I don’t know” without actually admitting our ignorance. If a rule is being applied, we ought to be able to state that rule (or at least to unpack it) in language that everyone can understand.
For example, buddha ends in dha (voiced, aspirated) despite the fact that the suffix for a passive past participle is ta (unvoiced, unaspirated). This is because of a series of regular changes known as Bartholomae’s Law. It is a feature of Indo-European pronunciation that a consonant cluster with a voiced consonant followed by unvoiced consonant forces the unvoiced consonant to become voiced: ta changes to da. The rule also says that aspiration moves to the end of the cluster dhda > ddha. This is a regular change observed across Sanskrit and Pāli and European languages. The rule is descriptive of what we see in practice.
An explanation which cannot cite such principles is untrustworthy. Phonetic change follows rules. That is why we can confidently reconstruct Proto-Indo-European. If an etymology cites no such rules, or cites them in an obscurantist way, then it’s not an explanation of anything.
Similarly, people who cite Pāṇini without a detailed discussion of which sutras are being applied and in which order, and according to which commentary on the Aṣṭādhyāyī, are just not credible. The fact is that no one uses Pāṇini without a commentary; it’s simply not possible.
The best way to get a sense of how a Pāli word is used, is to read many Pāli sentences in which that word is used. I was fortunate to have many opportunities to talk with Margaret Cone about work on the Dictionary of Pāli. She literally read every sentence recorded in Pāli containing a word that she was working on before composing her entry on that word. That’s why it took so long. And why her dictionary is so useful.
In those cases where a word is only used rarely or used ambiguously, we may be left with some residual uncertainty. What kind of bird was a sithalahanu for example? We’ll likely never know because the word is only used once and not in an illuminating way. And the etymology is no help. In my published article that covered this, I showed that the modern attribution of sithalahanu to the slack-billed stork only goes back to 1949, when the author cheerfully admits to having adopted it for aesthetic reasons.
Nor can dictionaries be wholly relied on. One of my early scholarly articles (2010) pointed out that the PED definition of paṭikaroti did not reflect how the word was used in Pāli.
Etymology is a tool we get from historical linguistics. It’s used mainly to show that two words in different languages share a common origin based on regular patterns of phonetic change (called “Laws” in the 19th century). These rules can be applied retroactively, allowing plausible reconstructions of unattested historical languages. This how we come to know about Proto-Indo-European.
But etymologies cited in isolation are not that helpful in translating buddhism into English. Most etymologies are merely decorative and citing them is a form of entertainment.