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( Pali)
Pali (ISO 15919/ALA-LC Pa?i) is a Middle Indo-Aryan language or prakrit of India. It is best known as the language of the earliest extant Buddhist canon, the Pa?i Tipitaka or Pa?i Canon, and as the liturgical language of Theravada Buddhism. Pali has since been written in a variety of scripts, from the Brahmic family scripts through to a romanised form devised with the research and contributions of Robert Caesar Childers and T. W. Rhys Davids, both of the Pali Text Society. The word Pali itself signifies "line" or "(canonical) text", and this name for the language seems to have its origins in commentarial traditions, wherein the "Pa?i" (in the sense of the line of original text quoted) was distinguished from the commentary or the vernacular following after it on the manuscript page. As such, the name of the language has caused some debate among scholars of all ages; the spelling of the name also varies, being found with both long "a" [??] and short "a" [a], and also with either a retroflex [?] or non-retroflex [l] "l" sound. To this day, there is no single, standard spelling of the term; all four spellings can be found in textbooks. R.C. Childers translates the word as "series" and states that the language "bears the epithet in consequence of the perfection of its grammatical structure."[1] Pali is a literary language of the Prakrit language family. When the canonical texts were written down in Sri Lanka in the first century BCE, Pali stood close to a living language; this is not the case for the commentaries.[2] Despite excellent scholarship on this problem, there is persistent confusion as to the inter-relation of Pa?i to the vernacular spoken in the ancient kingdom of Magadha (usually thought to have been modern-day Bihar, though new research suggests that it may have gotten that name after the Ashokan era. According to this theory, ancient Magadha was in the northwest of ancient India, in Baluchistan[3][4][5]). Pali as a Middle Indo-Aryan language is different from Sanskrit not so much with regard to the time of its origin than as to its dialectal base, since a number of its morphological and lexical features betray the fact that it is not a direct continuation of ?gvedic Vedic Sanskrit; rather it descends from a dialect (or a number of dialects) which was (/were), despite many similarities, different from ?gvedic.[6]
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Pali Articles
Achieving independent happiness by Abbas Ali
Yoga is something that relates to achieving independent happiness. Achieving independent happiness is the most important of yoga terms which most of use might not understand. The meaning of independent happiness refers to achieving a state of happi...
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