SuttaCentral
It is not a loanword but an irregular participle (uṇādi kṛdanta) derived from the verb root √pū (to purify).
The word puṇya therefore is explained as ‘pūyate anena iti’ (an act by which one is purified spiritually).
That does not make sense. When puṇya does not accumulate at all, doing more good leads not to any more puṇya as nothing accumulates. Doing more good then becomes the same as doing no good.
And which authority are you citing for this? Or are you claiming to be an authority, in which case, where did you publish this etymology?
I mentioned the source (uṇādi) above, seems you dont recognize it. The pañcapādi-uṇādi sūtras (sūtra 5.15) attributed to the pre-Pāṇinian grammarian Śākaṭāyana describes the formation of the word puṇya from the dhātu √pū (to purify) as follows:
pūño yaṇ ṇuk hrasvaśca yat | puṇyam |
If you understand Pāṇinian Prakriyā and Unādi sūtras, you would be able to follow the prakriyā (derivation logic)
Pānini was never my thing. I’m a historian. In fact, expecting anyone to know Pāṇini in this milieu is a bit weird. Typically, Buddhists don’t study Pāṇini. Most people here barely read any Pāli. However, my Sanskrit teacher happens to be a Pānini and Yāska expert, so I know that even quite clever people very often make mistakes in attempting to apply Pāṇini in this way (we have discussed many examples over the years).
Moreover, your previous attempts at grammatical arguments related to ṛta were not at all convincing, so I have reason to want a better explanation than a mere assertion of fact and an appeal to an esoteric literature that almost no one understands.
As such I have a few objections to deriving puṇya from √pū “cleanse”.
Apart from the weakness of the argument, I think we are once again well off-topic and into the etymological fallacy. In the final analysis: puñña means “good karma” in Pāli because that is how Buddhists use the word. And they don’t have any other use for it. As Wittgenstein said:
“For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.” ( Philosophical Investigations Section 43).
This is often boiled down to the maxim: meaning is use. Still, where the usage is clear, as it is in this case, it’s a waste of time to delve into speculations about origins that cannot possibly affect the outcome of the inquiry. No matter what you or I say about the putative “origins” of the word, the meaning of puñña in any Pāli sutta will still be “good karma”.
Etymology is vastly overrated as a linguistic tool. See also: Jayarava's Raves: The Emptiness of Etymology (24.3.23).
If you really want to understand how language works or what language does, study pragmatics.
I am a Sanskrit speaker and a student of Pāṇini and the uṇādi sūtras, and I’ve quoted my Sanskrit sources above . I’ve verbatim quoted the derivation of puṇyam above using the Uṇādi rule 5.15 (“pūño yaṇ ṇuk hrasvaśca yat | puṇyam |”) which is a sanskrit word, not a pali word.
Not sure why you speculate that I may have gotten my knowledge from Pali commentaries or that I was talking of the Pali cognate of puṇya (i.e. about puñña).
I learn Paninian grammar orally in Sanskrit medium through Sanskrit commentarial glosses from a traditional Indian scholar of Paninian grammar. I think I know what I am speaking about fairly well, and I check my sources well. So I am not going to respond to your speculative objections as I was not stating my personal opinion but rather the conclusions known to all Pāṇinian scholars.
That you dont know Pāṇini or Uṇādi grammar is not something I can do much about. But my sources are cited for anyone to verify if they know the subject, even in future.
You are free to take it to your Pāṇini-expert Sanskrit teacher and seek his opinion on what it means, or if he cant make sense of it, ask him to email me at my gmail (my gmail ID is the same as my forum ID here) and I can probably make him understand the word derivation for puṇya from √pū (if he is a Pāṇini expert he wont have a problem understanding me or the standard commentaries).
You are right that these days students of Pali Buddhism dont study Pāṇinian grammar or word derivations, nor do most academic professors of Sanskrit outside India. But to advanced students of Pāli, knowing Pāṇinian grammar and Sanskrit is a sine qua non to really get to the crux of the syntax and morphology of Pāli. There is no world-authority of Pali who is not a sanskrit student.
However they cannot call themselves Pāṇinian experts if they “very often make mistakes in attempting to apply Pāṇini in this way”. That would be like me, a student of Pāṇinian grammar, not yet beyond making mistakes, calling myself an expert prematurely.
By the way Tamil is my native language (it is a relatively old Dravidian language), and I probably know better Dravidian grammar than your “Sanskrit experts”. Puṇya is not a Dravidian word to my knowledge as it is a transparent borrowing from Sanskrit.
Page 2755 of the Madras University Tamil Lexicon defines the Tamil word puṇṇiyam (புண்ணியம்) as being a borrowing from Sanskrit puṇya.
Page 674 of Hermann Gundert’s Malayalam & English dictionary defines the Malayālam word puṇyam (പുണ്യം) as a borrowing from Sanskrit.
Which Dravidian dictionary or professor describes puṇya as a Dravidian-origin word?
What’s the name of the expert who taught you that it is a Dravidian origin word borrowed into Sanskrit?
You are right I should have cited some sources. Yesterday I consulted:
Monier-Williams Dictionary
Apte’s Dictionary
Mayrhofer’s Etymological Sanskrit Dictionary.
Whitney’s “root’s, verb forms…”
Edgerton’s BHSD.
Indo-European Lexicon: PIE Etyma and IE Reflexes. Indo-European Lexicon: PIE Etyma and IE Reflexes
Bodewitz, Henk. " Vedic Terms Denoting Virtues and Merits". In: Vedic Cosmology and Ethics.
Editors: Dory Heilijgers, Jan Houben, and Karel van Kooij, 368–404.
Truman, Michelson. “The Etymology of Sanskrit Puṇya”. Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, Vol. 40 (1909), pp. 23-29 (7 pages)
Michael Witzel: Substrate Languages in Old Indo-Aryan (Rgvedic, Middle and Late Vedic). Journal of Electronic Vedic Studies.
I saw nothing at all to support your contention. Ergo I don’t believe you. I’m not going to take your word for it just because you claim to know and can spout an unfamiliar jargon. The more unfamiliar jargon you spout, the less I trust your opinion. I want to see corroboration from someone who has some credibility.
Worse, as I’ve now said twice, this discussion is irrelevant and ought to be moved to a separate thread. These ideas of yours have no bearing on the questions at hand. This is not how we understand what Pāli words are intended to convey.
Prof. Apte’s Dictionary entry (which normally includes Pāṇinian and Uṇādi word derivations wherever possible) on Puṇya begins by citing the Uṇādi Sūtra 5.15 I’ve quoted above
puṇya a. [Uṇ. 5. 15]…
Monier Williams’ Dictionary entry on Puṇya also cites the same Uṇādi sūtra 5.15 (along with Theodor Benfey’s? guesses about other alternative derivations)
Puṇya ¦ mf(ā)n. (perhaps fr. √ 2. puṣ; according to, Uṇ. V.15 from √pū)…
Although you’ve said you looked at Apte and MW Dictionaries, I guess you perhaps didnt understand what you saw?
If a dictionary doesnt mention native sources, even to deny their correctness, then it is likely those authors themselves lack exposure to native grammars or grammatical methods - or would have likely thought them to be too difficult to understand for themselves or their intended audience.
But native (Indian) modern scholars lay great importance even now to Pāṇinian prakriyā (word derivations) and wouldnt consider someone an expert in grammar until they can apply Pāṇini’s rules on the fly to validate Sanskrit word forms.
Your disbelief in my sources (or in two of your own sources) does not matter to me. I do not expect a historian with no exposure to native Sanskrit grammatical methods to understand the topic, let alone offer a correct solution to grammatical and etymological intricacies of Old-Indo-Aryan words.
Witzel as far as I am aware is not an authority on Pāṇini, nor was Truman, Bodewitz, Edgerton, Mayrhofer or Whitney - although I have not seen any of them suggest it to be a dravidian loanword or derivative as you have. Prof. Apte was a Pāṇinian authority, so are modern Western academics like Prof. George Cardona, Prof. Madhav Deshpande, Prof. Ashok Aklujkar and a few others - but not many Pāṇinian authorities write dictionaries these days.
I agree the thread can be split - with sincere apologies to @Dogen and the @moderators - for the diversion and additional work to split it (but I early-on didnt expect such continual obstinacy from someone who is clearly out of their depth on the topic) - it was meant to be a quick response (to the claim that the etymology of the word is unclear) to educate anyone who isnt aware how puṇya is traditionally etymologized by Pāṇinian scholars - starting from Pāṇini himself who incorporates uṇādi irregular derivations into his own grammatical framework via the sūtra 3.3.1 (uṇādayo bahulam).