Commentary as a Tool for the Emendation of Canonical Readings: A Critical Survey on Lemmas and their Exegeses in Therīgāthā Aṭṭhakathā

Abstract

This study critically scans the commentarial lemmas and the interpretations in order to reach better emendations of some terms in current Tipitaka editions. The term “lemmas” here stand for the canonical terms that have been quoted for the purpose of interpretation in the commentaries. Most of current academic Buddhist studies, which are conducted in Sri Lanka with reference to the Pali commentaries, can be divided into two categories. The first of those often refers to the Pali commentaries to elucidate the abstruse meaning of canonical readings while the second category takes the commentaries as an isolated source material to investigate the semantic, pragmatic, aesthetic, grammatical and historical aspects of them. However, none of these shows the optimal efficacy of a Pali commentary. This paper proves with substantial evidence the trustworthiness of the use of commentarial exegeses as a substantial tool to rectify the existing contaminated readings of the Pali canon. Significantly, this paper attempts to draw the attention of Buddhist academia to utilize the commentarial exegeses in the process of critical emendation, which enables to enhance the quality of academic Buddhist studies in Sri Lanka. Even though the Pali Canon is available in several editions such as Buddha-Jayanti (Sri Lanka), Chaṭṭhasaṅgīti (Myanmar), and PTS (England), etc., the obvious fact is that each of these editions has its own idiosyncrasy regarding some readings. Sometimes, the same Canonical term is recorded in the aforementioned editions in a different way. For instance, we can pay our attention to a certain term that occurs in Tapokamma-sutta of Saṃyutta-Nikāya. This particular term is recorded in these three editions as vammani, dhammani and ajahmani respectively. In order to minimize these types of anomalies, the commentarial interpretations are of paramount significance. Therefore, one of the major objectives of this study is to systematically evaluate the commentarial exegeses. However, due to the breadth of the scope this paper pays the particular attention on the lemmas and their pertinent interpretations in the Therīgāthā Commentary. It is apparent that all of the existing editions of Therīgāthā have paid satisfactory attention to its commentary. In addition, those who have hitherto translated text have also been considerably influenced by its commentarial exegeses. Some editors have been hasty to reach arbitrary substitutions without a substantial basis. However, many of them have not used this commentary in an optimal manner in order to reach more trustworthy emendations of Therīgāthā. Thus, this paper attempts to fill that gap paying adequate attention to the other parallel canonical, commentarial proof and corresponding Sanskrit accounts.