Pāli: Reconsidering the Academic Paradigm in the Study

of Early Buddhism

Abstract

In this essay, I shall provide a coherent reconstruction of early Buddhist thought in South Asia.

Throughout the essay I shall provide an interdisciplinary, transcultural and transgenderal framework

for a very complicated and extremely interrelated discourse-analysis, bound to yield unexpected novel

results. My theoretically broad methodological approach will question widespread assumptions about

the very nature of Buddhist thought, humanity, life, humanity, Buddhist thought, and thought, and

will cause a much needed plagiarism-shift in the academic study of Buddhism – a true desideratum –

as well as improved relationships between different academic disciplines (and, by extension, between

the world’s major superpowers).

The textual basis of my article will be mostly drawn from Pāli sources. However, so as not to burden

you, the readers, with an unnecessarily heavy dose of technicalities, I will restrict my textual samples

to include only those sources that are truly relevant in advancing my very tight argument, and in fact

I will restrict my textual samples to a single Pāli word – the word ‘Pāli’. This word figures no less than

392 times in Pāli sources, which should provide an amply adequate textual basis.

Introduction

In the technicality of that technical (very technical) thing, everything is very, very complex and

elaborate, and (if we somehow manage to be very careful and attentive, despite our own limitations

and habituated inclinations1) we shall perhaps gain some valid insights in the understanding of the

comprehension of the insights into the exegesis of the hermeneutics of the Pali texts belonging to the

Buddhist tradition of the Theravada transmission of knowledge if we analyse the actuality experienced

in accordance with the oral tradition from which these texts were derived in the first place, even

though we are not disciples but scholars, possibly deriving possible valid exegetical conclusions which

will be relevant and may be even helpful for our field, called Buddhist Studies since at least the middle

of the Nineteenth Century (although I am not certain about the exact first instances of such usage),

and for the field that is sometimes (only sometimes, but not always) known as ‘History of Religions’,

more broadly, by analysing a term composed, made up of, and analysable into (if we are attentive to

its etymological constitution in accordance with the oral structure of the Pāli texts belonging to the

Theravada school of Buddhism), two syllables: Pā-li.

But if on the other hand we wish to persist in our post-industrial and pre-post-anti-colonialist

modernist-imperialist attitudes towards languages, cultures, and the transmission of knowledge, it is

at the very least (at the very least!) unlikely (unlikely) that we shall assuage the heuristic hermeneutic

exegetical tools for an appropriate valid convincing exegetical hermeneutical (Gadamerian) heuristics

that may allow us to assuage the acceptations of the variable steps in the complex elaborate very

1

See on this John Doe, ‘Our Own Limitations and Habituated Inclinations’

(www.ourownlimitationsandhabituatedinclinations.blogspot.org.com, last accessed on March 34, 1973, around 4.00 am).

difficult process of purification of mental states from mental afflictions which afflict the mind and

which hamper the ultimate process of gradual liberation from suffering as a whole and in all the

various aspects which have been orally explicated in the predominantly oral mileu that, directly or

indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, vertically or horizontally, defined the structure and the

specific phrasing of specific texts within, specifically, the specific Theravada tradition of Buddhism that

expressed itself in a language that now has come to be known (in certain relatively well-informed

circles within and without South-East Asia) as Pāli.

In the specifically specific specificity of the particularly particular particularity (a necessary, and let me

fearlessly venture to say, occasionally useful generalization) of the utterance of the two syllables that

comprise the original Pāli term ‘Pāli’, a lot is involved. In order to approach this abstract problematics

with adequate socio-polio-anthropological tools, I will envisage an experiment, inviting readers to re-

calibrate their perception of the primary textual basis that forms the necessary foundation of this

essay. Try to utter the term ‘Pāli’. Then walk three steps to the left. Utter it again. Jump four times.

Utter it again. Eat plain rice and utter ‘Pāli’, then eat rice with vegetables and utter ‘Pāli’. Talk to a

friendly person and observe the difference in your utterance of the phonemes ‘Pāli’ as compared to

your utterance following a discussion with an unfriendly person (or a house lizard).

I am confident that this simple yet instructive experiment shall convince us all of the paramount

necessity of respectful research that takes into account broader interdisciplinary concerns and

methods, while remaining faithful to a reliable textual basis.

Conclusions

It shall by now have become clear that the previous paragraph constitutes no less than the breaking

point between old ways of thinking about early Buddhism and a novel plagiarism-shift in the academic

study of this broad tradition.

While previous scholars have posed undue emphasis on a somewhat naïve (mis)appropriation of the

content of disparate textual sources, naively convinced that mere textual erudition, philological rigour,

common-sense, minimal logical coherence, and overall mental sanity, could be of assistance in

interpreting the thought of texts that they, naively, considered to have been composed by sentient

beings whose intent could be in any way commensurable with contemporary middle-class overweight

pale sweaty adult males sitting in greyish armchairs and in complete ignorance of basic facts about les

differences (Derrida), the present essay should have by now convinced us of an undisputable fact

about our existence and the world that is constantly shaping it while being shaped by it: Pāli, or

perhaps, Pā-li.