Pali Text Society TRANSLATION SeRrEs, No. 8 (Extra Supscription) THE EXPOSITOR (ATTHASALINI) BUDDHAGHOSA’S COMMENTARY ON THE DHAMMASANGANI THE FIRST BOOK OF THE ABHI- DHAMMA PITAKA VOL. I. TRANSLATED BY MAUNG TIN, M.A. PROFESSOR OF PALI AT THE COLLEGE, RANGOON EDITED AND REVISED BY MRS. RHYS DAVIDS, D.Litt., M.A. London PUBLISHED FOR THE PALI TEXT SOCIETY BY THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, AMEN CORNER, E.C. AND AT NEW YORK, TORONTO, MELBOURNE, AND BOMBAYEDITORIAL NOTE Iris now fully four years since the translation of this important Commentary was begun by Mr. Maung Tin, the representative of the Pali Text Society in Burma. Obstacles confronted him at the commencement, and many difficulties along the way. With a training and a diploma got at Calcutta University, and a proficiency in Pali, Burmese, and English, as well as in Sanskrit and Prakrit, he was anxious to prove himself in the field, yet so lacking in competent labourers, of the ancient classical literature adopted by his native land. Workers. in other lands warned him off successively from making more accessible two or three notable works as well as the Atthasa- lini, but on this work, not yet begun elsewhere, he took his stand, and during the last year of menace at sea the type- script came over piecemeal in safety. As to the many difli- culties in the work itself, there was the lamentable need of revision in the PTS edition of the text, and the many obscuri- ties and elliptical clauses (occurring amid a good deal of un- necessary redundancy) in Buddhaghosa’s style. I do not say, nor would the translator claim, that the result is every- where satisfactory. But we judge that we have made more possible, by this pioneer effort, the production of a really good translation in the future. It is no light effort, all who know the text will agree, for a man to have accomplished the pioneer translation of such a work into a foreign tongue. We should look around for long to find an Englishman capable of such a task. The translator is hoping soon to renew uni- versity study at Oxford, and I trust that there and thereafter much good work in Pali literature from his pen will come to aid our knowledge. Of the Atthasalini or Atthasalini itself I have had my say elsewhere. The many interesting psychological disquisitions Wilviii Editorial Note in its pages I have also tried to deal with elsewhere, always feeling sorely the need of such a translation as is given below. Here I will only say that the title literally rendered—‘ abound- ing in meaning’ or (for attha has many ‘ meanings’) matter, or profit, etc.—baffled us and ‘ Expositor’ (it should be Expositrix)! is a makeshift for which I plead guilty. And I add one more comment. He has made allusion to terms, in my own ’prentice work on the text (of which this work is the: Commentary), the English- ing of which I have since agreed to modify. He has himself altered other terms, and that is quite as it should be. If I ever revise for reprint that now exhausted edition, I shall have other such details to alter. On the word cetand: volition, I have already commented in the Compendium of Philosophy, p. 238, n.3. Another term of great importance in Buddhist thought, and for the translator very elusive, is riipa. On this term another equally instructive note by Mr. Aung should also be studied (op. cit. pp. 271-3). We have followed him in not rendering riipa by ‘form.’ ‘Shape’ or ‘form’ is no doubt the popular and the more archaic sense. If you make a ‘likeness,’ say a clay model of any person or thing, you would call it his or its riipa. And the primeval factors employed by the creative Brahman in peopling the earth were called ‘name’ and ‘shape’ or ‘form’ (namariipa)2 But for the specialisation required in Abhidhamma these renderings are a little unwieldy. This may be seen more clearly by quoting from the following pages three sentences. ‘ Ripa is that which changes its state’ (p. 69). ‘ The ruipa comes into the avenue of the mind-door ’ (p. 96). ‘ He develops the path for rebirth in the sphere of ripa’ (p. 216). It is fairly clear that no one English word would fit all three cases. They deal, taken in order, with (a) something essentially plastic and mutable as distinct from a relatively constant and rigid factor—the ‘name’. or, according to the Dhammasangani, mind and 1 However, the translator would none of her! 2 Cf. hereon ‘Gestalt’ in Die Weltanschauung der Brahmana-Texte, Géttingen, 1919, pp. 102 f., 114, by Hermann Oldenberg—the last con- tribution, I believe, to our Indological knowledge, by this great scholar whose loss to such studies it will be hard to make good.