PALI

The Pali language originated in northern India in the centuries before the Common Era, but spread throughout the Theravāda Buddhist countries, first to southern India, and then to Sri Lanka and South East Asia, as a language of scholarship and religion. The early history of the language, and even its original name, is something of a mystery. The current use of the name ‘Pali’ is in fact the result of a misunderstanding. Pāḷi was originally the word for a text, as distinct from a commentary (aṭṭhakathā), so pāḷi-bhāsā meant ‘the language of the sacred texts’. But by about the seventeenth century CE it had come to be understood as a name, ‘the Pali language’, and the usage has stuck. Its own speakers in ancient India seem to have called it Māgadha-bhāsā, meaning that it was the language of Māgadha in north-east India. But the name ‘Māgadha’ itself seems to have had a range of meanings. At times it referred to a small area around the city of Rājagaha (Sanskrit Rājagṛha, modern Rajgir, Bihar); at others to a large area under the suzerainty of the rulers of Pāṭaliputta (Sanskrit Pāṭaliputra, modern Patna, Bihar). Judging from surviving inscriptions, there was a wide degree of standardization in the language of the whole administrative area, with certain differences in local dialect which would not have prevented its being generally understood.28 The language of the Pali Canon was therefore not simply one dialect among many, but a form of the lingua franca of a powerful empire