A History of Pali Literature v2.c16.2

v2.c16.2

Vyākaraṇa is the accepted Indian term to denote a book of grammar. This very term was used to denote one of the six Vedāṅgas, or sciences or treatises auxiliary to the four Vedas. We have in the ancient vocabulary another term to denote another amongst the six Vedāṅgas, namely, the Chandas or treatise or treatises on metre or prosody. The treatises on Alaṅkāra or Poetics were later offshoots of the treatises on grammar. The beginnings of lexicography (abhidhāna) can similarly be traced in the Nigrantha sections of the treatises on exegetical etymology—the Nirukta denoting another amongst the six Vedāṅgas. Corresponding to the Sanskrit Vyākaraṇa we have the Pāli Veyyākaraṇa, counted among the nine types of literary texts or compositions (navaṅgaṃ satthu-sāsanaṃ). But the Pāli term, as explained by Buddhaghosa and other Buddhist commentators, was far from signifying any treatise on grammar. They have taken it to represent that distinct literary type which is characterised by prose exegeses, the Abhidhamma books being mentioned as chief examples of such a type.¹ There is indeed another Pāli word, Vyākaraṇa, which is phonetically the exact equivalent of the Sanskrit Vyākaraṇa, but in Buddhist terminology it means ‘announcement or prediction’. The term ‘Veyyākaraṇa’ means ‘exposition or explanation, the function of which is to make things explicit or clear’. If this term be applied to a treatise on grammar, we can understand that the main function of grammar is to help expositions of texts by clearing up the connections of letters, words, sentences, their sequence, and the rest. The importance of grammar has been sufficiently emphasized in early Buddhism in a verse of the Dhammapada which reads:—