The Pali Text Society's Pali-English dictionary - Tuninst.net

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FOREWORD.
It is somewhat hard to realize, seeing how important and valuable the work has
been, that when Robert Caesar Childers published, in 1872, the first volume of his
Pali Dictionary, he only had at his command a few pages of the canonical Pali books.
Since then, owing mainly to the persistent labours of the Pali Text Society, practically
the whole of these books, amounting to between ten and twelve thousand pages, have
been made available to scholars. These books had no authors. They are anthologies
which gradually grew up in the community. Their composition, as to the Vinaya and
the four Nikayas (with the possible exception of the supplements) was complete within
about a century of the Buddha's death ; and the rest belong to the following century.
When scholars have leisure to collect and study the data to be found in this pre-
Sanskrit literature, it will necessarily throw as much light on the history of ideas and
language as the study of such names and places as are mentioned in it (quite inci-
dentally) has already thrown upon the political divisions, social customs, and economic
conditions of ancient India.
'Some of these latter facts I have endeavoured to collect in my 'Buddhist India';
ancjLpCThaps the most salient discovery is the quite unexpected conclusion that, for
about two centuries (both before the Buddha's birth and after his death), the paramount
power in India was Kosala — a kingdom stretching from Nepal on the North
to the Ganges on the South, and from the Ganges on the West to the territories
of the Vajjian confederacy on the East. In this, the most powerful kingdom in India;
there had naturally arisen a standard vernacular differing from the local forms of speech
just as standard English differs from the local (usually county) dialects. The Pali of the
canonical books is based on that standard Kosala vernacular as spoken in the 6^^ and
^"> centuries B. C. It cannot be called the 'literary' form of that vernacular, for it was
not written at all till long afterwards. That vernacular was the mother tongue of the
Buddha. He was born in what is now Nepal, but was then a district under the suzer-
ainty of Kosala and in one of the earliest Pali documents he is represented as calling
himself a Kosalan.
When, about a thousand years afterwards, some pandits in Ceylon began to write
in Pali, they wrote in a style strikingly different from that of the old texts. Part of
that difference is no doubt due simply to a greater power of fluent expression unham-
pered by the necessity of constantly considering that the words composed had to be
learnt by heart. When the Sinhalese used Pali, they were so familiar with the method
of writing on palmleaves that the question of memorizing simply did not arise. It
cam* up again later. But none of the works belonging to this period were intended
to be learnt. They were intended to be read.
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