Pali and Buddhism
ABSTRACT
Pāli is an Indo-Aryan language that was devised specially to transcribe in the third century BCE the oral preaching of Gautama Buddha (who lived in the sixth-fifth centuries BCE) in Lumbini, Shakya Republic (present-day Nepal). Pāli is not so much an artificial language as a language adapted to the particular discourse it tries to transcribe and derived from probably several closely related other Indo-Aryan languages with Sanskrit being kept in the background all the time. Pāli has the originality not to be attached to a writing system so that it can be written with any of the writing systems in use in the Indian subcontinent and in Southeast Asia, including, in more recent times, the Latin writing system extended for some diacritic elements. We have to understand Buddhism is a particular development of old Sanskrit classic Vedas with the declared ambition to differentiate itself from the various trends and branches of Vedic and ascetic preaching that produced Hinduism. The main difference is the refusal of any godlike creator of the universe.
I will study here the fundamental role of the four participles, the absolutive and the infinitive in the building of this predicatory discourse.
The four participles are adjectival or nominal non-finite verbal forms predicatively expanding either noun phrases or verbal phrases with four possible forms and values:
1- The past participle of an action seen as fully completed is an adjectival expansion of a noun phrase.
2- The active past participle is an adjectival expansion of a noun phrase seen as the agent of an action that has been fully completed.
3- The present participle is an adjectival expansion of a noun phrase with an action that is seen in progress, hence partly completed and partly virtual.
4- The future passive participle is an adjectival form expanding a noun phrase with an action that should, must, or could be done with the contradiction between the injunctive or optative modalization and the passive completion attached to a noun phrase which is the virtual actant who should, must or could carry this…
