[INDOLOGY] The Buddhist term sutta

[Stefan Baums]

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