You said, “Hi Lal, thanks for your readiness to answer our questions!
I have a couple of questions as to Rajitha if you don’t mind.”
Answer: Sorry. I guess I was in a rush and missed some of your questions.
1.I already explained that “atta” is a perception in one’s mind. It is gender neutral. It can have several closely related meanings depending on the context: helpless, fruitless, essence-less, etc
2.The change in interpretation of anicca and anatta happened well after Buddhaghosa, who only changed real Anapanasati bhavana to breath meditation and also introduced Hindu kasina meditation as Buddhist.
The early Europeans who came across both Sanskrit Vedic literature in India and Pali literature in Sri Lanka were responsible for introducing the incorrect interpretations for anicca and anatta. They thought anicca is same as Sanskrit Anitya (which does mean impermanence), and anatta to be the same as anathma (which does mean no-self). Details are given in the post I referred to earlier.
Both India and Sri Lanka were in bad shape in those days (1800’s), and there were not many learned bhikkhus in Sri Lanka to intervene. The excellent book, “The Search for the Buddha” by Charles Allen (2003) describes this historical background well. Of course he does not talk about anicca, anatta.
3.Sinhala is very close to Pali, as I have detailed at my website. The Tipitaka was written with Sinhala script, since Pali does not have its own alphabet. Then Sinhala Arahants wrote Sinhala commentaries to explain the deep concepts in the Tipitaka, and actually Buddhaghosa’s task was to edit and convert those Sinhala commentaries to Pali. Visuddhimagga was the result. There is an original Pali version of Visuddhimagga (available on Amazon), and one can see that anicca and anatta remain intact. But he did misinterpret Anapana and Kasina meditations.
I have explained all this in the Historical Background section at my website, as mentioned in earlier comments. You can also read about it in Bhikkhu Nyanamoli’s translation of Visuddgimagga. In the Introduction, he discusses how Buddhaghosa was sent to Sri Lanka by a bhikkhu named Revata in India, to translate the Sinhala Commentaries to Pali.
4.You sad, “Why don’t you consider the Sinhala word api that most probably comes from atman”. The only Sinhala word “api” that I know means “us”. What does that have to do with atman? Also, atman is a Sanskrit word, and I think it is related to athma. But both those words have nothing to with atta or anatta. This is the mistake that those early European scholars did. They tried to find the roots for Pali words in Sanskrit.
5.There are many Sanskrit words used in Sinhala. Some of them, like “artha” can be used, even though not necessary. The actual Pali word is pronounced “aththa”, i.e., atta. As I said, atta has many closely related meanings depending on where used.
By the way, even in English, the meaning of a word can depend on the where used: The word “right” has two different meanings in “Take a right turn” and “You are right”, for example.
6.My only source is Tipitaka, and the discourses of Waharaka Thero who pointed out the connections between Pali and Sinhala words.
When you talk about “scholars”, how can scholars who are not even Buddhists explain deep concepts in Buddha Dhamma? Those early European scholars had no idea about Buddha Dhamma. Translating Tipitaka cannot be compared to translating a book from one language to another. There are deep Dhamma concepts like anicca and anatta, that they had no idea about.
But I must say (as I emphasized in my posts), that I am grateful to those early European scholars who devoted their lives to collect and preserve those Pali documents. If not for them, most of those could have been lost. As can be seen in the old pictures from 1800’s in Charles Allen’s book, both India and Sri Lanka were in very bad shape in the 1800’s.
7.I already replied to this.
With metta, Lal
canto
