Dear Tim, > But this is not really much to support sutta < sūkta, since the > regular Pāli form parallel to sūkta includes the glide -v-
yes, in the intentionally transparent formation used in the nibbacana you cite, but maybe that does not on its own exclude an opaque doublet sutta < sūkta. On the other hand, in the first century CE in Gāndhārī (the only MIA language that in principle preserved the contrast between OIA kt and tr), the word is consistently spelled sutra- and always means “canonical Buddhist text” (for some value of “canonical”), and in some third/fourth-century secular documents it refers to literal thread or rope: https://gandhari.org/dictionary/sutra There are no discussions about the meaning or etymology of the word in what we have of that tradition, but it contrasts with nideśa- “explanation” in a set of commentaries: https://gandhari.org/corpus/ckm0004 https://gandhari.org/corpus/ckm0009 https://gandhari.org/corpus/ckm0011 https://gandhari.org/corpus/ckm0015 https://gandhari.org/corpus/ckm0020 Neither the Pali nor the Gāndhārī evidence rules out reinterpretations in the first four hundred years of the Buddhist tradition, of course, and Buddhaghosa’s passage may preserve an echo. All best, Stefan -- Stefan Baums, Ph.D. Institut für Indologie und Tibetologie Ludwig‐Maximilians‐Universität München _______________________________________________ INDOLOGY mailing list [email protected] https://list.indology.info/mailman/listinfo/indology
