Table Of ContentPALI
TEXT
SOCIETY
THE
[GUIDE
NANAMOLI
1977
THE GUIDE
Pali Geyt Society
TRANSLATION SERIES, NO. 33
THE GUIDE
(NETTI-PPAKARANAM)
ACCORDING TO
KACCANA THERA
TRANSLATED FROM THE PALI BY
BHIKKHU NANAMOLI
Published by
THE PALI TEXT SOCIETY, LONDON
Distributed by
ROUTLEDGE & KEGAN PAUL LTD.
LONDON, HENLEY AND BOSTON
1977
First published . . . 1962
Reprinted . . . .. 1977
ISBN 0 7100 8576 1
© PALI TEXT SOCIETY
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
UNWIN BROTHERS LIMITED
THE GRESHAM PRESS, OLD WOKING, SURREY, ENGLAND
A MEMBER OF THE STAPLES PRINTING GROUP
GENERAL CONTENTS
PAGE
TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION - - - ii
v
1. The Guide (Nettippakararia) - - - -- vii
2. Editions of the Text - x
3. History and Authorship x
4. Date ii
x
5. The Nettippakarana and Petakopadesa compared - xiii
6. Authorship and Date reconsidered - xxvi
7. The Form of the Guide and its Method in Outline - xxix
8. Renderings of the Guide's Technical Terms - - xxxiii
9. The Method: its Practical Use: Discussion - - xliii
10. The Pali Commentaries' Debt to the Guide - - liii
11. Quotations in the Guide lv
12. Some peculiar minor Features - lvi
13. The Guide and Indian Methods of Exegesis - - lix
14. Renderings of Technical Sutta and other Terms - lix
15. General - - - - - - -- km
TEXTS USED lxv
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS - - - - - - lxvii
DETAILED CONTENTS OF THE GUIDE - - - lxix
THE GUIDE
A. COMPREHENSIVE SECTION - - - - -- 3
B. SPECIFICATION SECTION - - - - -- 5
Part I. 1. Indicative Subsection - 5
Part II. 2. Demonstrative Subsection - 8
3. Counter-demonstrative Subsection - - 13
v
vi General Contents
PAGE
Part III. Chapter i. 16 Modes of Conveying in Separate
Treatment - - - - 13
Part IV. Chapter ii. 16 Modes of Conveying in Com
bined Treatment 119
Part V. Chapter iii. The Moulding of the Guide-Lines 148
Part VI. Chapter iv. The Pattern of the Dispensation - 173
INDEXES
I. General Index (English-Pali) - - - -- 253
II. List of Similes 283
III. List of Quotations - 283
IV. Glossary (Pali-English) 288
APPENDIX 308
TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION
1. THE GUIDE
The book here translated—as it stands, it was perhaps composed
more than two thousand years ago—sets forth a method intended
for the guidance of those who already know intellectually the
Buddha's teaching and want to explain his utterances. It is not a
commentary but a guide for commentators: it deals with scaffolding,
not with architecture. Its name, Nettippakarana, means 'guide-
treatise', but the translation has been called, more simply, the
Guide.
There are two recognized aspects of language, which are comple
mentary, that is to say the Normative and the Contextual.
Of the normative theory of language the familiar characteristic
product is Grammar, which fixes the forms of words in a given
language and the rules for their formal association. Subordinating
ideas to words, it tacitly assumes that the correct meanings of known
words can, if not yet ascertained, inherently all be defined un
equivocally in the Dictionary.1 There words (with their rules)
figure as the keys to ideas regarded as named by them, and contexts
are thus relegated to a mere matter of style. But the Guide disposes
of Grammar in one sub-heading (§186) and the Dictionary in one
heading (Mode 11, 'Synonyms'). It cannot be called even a
'hermeneutic grammar'. Grammar seeks to govern all ideas
through words.
'Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of them
selves': but sometimes to be 'sense-wise' is to be 'sound-foolish'.
Words have, in their use, a notorious ambivalence which remains
always beyond the power of the Grammar and the Dictionary fully
to control. However precisely defined, they still retain that
element of inherent ambiguity (not vagueness), in virtue of which,
for a specially outstanding example, metaphor is not only possible
but necessary for a language to live, and a language—even a 'dead'
1 While Panini fixed the grammar of Sanskrit in the first centuries B.C.,
the earliest extant Pali grammar is the Kaccdyanappahararva, traditionally
attributed to the Buddha's pupil Maha-Kaccayana Thera but according to
Western scholarship composed sometime after the beginning of the 5th century
A.C. The first Pali dictionary is the AbhidhdnappadipiJcd compiled by
Moggallana Thera in Ceylon in the 12th century A.C.
Vli
viii The Guide
language—lives when it is used. A contextual theory of language
recognizes use in contexts as an essential (ad hoc) denning element of
words, as representing ideas and here subordinate to them. But
contexts, theoretically unlimited, are limited arbitrarily in fact by
the necessary conventions of usage in communication; and usage, as
well as being thus arbitrary in the limitations it has to impose, is
subject both to caprice and to change (this aspect of language must
be essentially statistical). Properly the Guide—as we evaluate it
now—belongs here; for, as it will appear later, the task it has set
itself is simply that of showing compendious ways of eliciting from a
given individual textual passage the implications that the very
bulky contexts of a teaching as a whole both allow and require.
Therein it is concerned with a particular usage. It seeks to promote
correct wordings of known meanings and to prevent deviations
creeping into such re-wording as a commentary in that usage must
involve. And the devices it employs for this purpose are, in fact,
nothing other than 'contextual types' chosen to suggest the desired
implications, these 'contextual types' being set out in the form of
the 16 Modes of Conveying (a communication) and the 5 Guide-Lines
(to the verbal expression of the Pitafoi-teaching's meaning-as-aim,
namely 'liberation' in whatever way expressed). The Guide seeks to
control words through known ideas.
Two kinds of use of language can be distinguished. One extends
to describing, gathering evidence, exploiting, commenting, drawing
conclusions, and so on; it is oriented to the discovery of some
thing new. The other seeks to exercise the ideas so discovered
while at the same time preserving them intact and preventing
their change and loss. It seeks consistency and is averted from
what is new.
Regarded in this light, the Guide belongs under the second kind.
It deduces nothing and concludes nothing. It simply draws from
the Suttas (more or less directly in each case) 16 contextual type-
situations and 5 verbal lines converging on the Suttas' meaning-as-
aim. From such an apparatus nothing could, in fact, be deduced
or concluded. It can only facilitate re-wording of the ideas already
expressed in the Suttas. And that is what it sets out to do. All the
many passages of a commentarial or definitive nature in its
exemplification are incidental to its main purpose, which is one
reason why its definitions of words are always ad hoc and often
multiple and variant. Its elements (Sect. 7b) and how they are
exemplified must be clearly distinguished.
Translator's Introduction ix
Commenting, like translating, consists in the re-wording of an
idea. (And words are related to their meanings and to each other
by minds.) The ideas to be re-worded should be known clearly to
the commentator, as they should to the translator; but when the
grammar and the dictionary have supplied all the aid they can, the
new wording, whether in the same language or in another, still needs
controlling in the matter of the new contexts and the trains of
thought it follows and suggests. With Metaphor (and the Pseudo-
metaphor or Pun) possible, not only do words tend, in new uses, to
suggest and allow to infiltrate after them their own habitual families
of contexts that may bring about deviation of the ideas they are
intended to re-express, but also it is as well known as it is often
forgotten that an individual set of contexts, each with a cipher or a
gap—a strange word (an iaj>arimana-j>add>. see §49)—in it, will
prompt the mind to supply or form an idea as a 'meaning' to fill the
lacuna. So the re-wording of an intellectually known idea without
due precautions in regard to this aspect may make a communication
different from what was intended, and it can even mislead the
would-be commentator, or translator, himself by undermining in his
mind the ideas that were intellectually clear to him.
Works on the contextual aspect of language are few.2 The
present one is a special case; for it is concerned with a particular
branch and specifically with the Buddha's teaching. Normally this
aspect of language is left to the native wit of the individual to
manage as best he can. Its nature must make it much less easy
than in the case of Grammar for the theory to emerge from the
welter of material in which it is embedded. How far the book—
especially the detailed part—has actually succeeded in its purpose
must be for the inquirer to decide. It is only not easy going if
mistreated as an actual commentary—as an attempt directly to
explain ideas in the Buddha's teaching taken as not yet sufficiently
clear, or to give demonstrative proof of some conclusion drawn—
instead of taking it for what it is, namely a guide for the re-wording
of ideas already known. If so mistreated it must seem not only
quite procrustean at times but also a capricious mixture of the vague
and the obvious, by which almost anything can be proved. But
that would be to take it wrongly. Its instructions are, in fact, such
2 RogeVs Thesaurus is the classical English example of this approach to
language, with its 'Tabular Synopsis of Categories' ('Plan of Classification')
and its avowed objects of finding a word for a meaning already to hand and
of suggesting trains of thought.
