pada may mean ‘place, station’.
There is a discussion on pāda/pada by Renou. Unfortunately I cannot go into the details immediately. But I remember that it occurred either in the Introduction Générale AiG I 1957 or in ‘Notes sur la version “Paippalāda” de l’Atharvaveda’ Journal Asiatique 1964, 421-450. I may give further information later.
Best
DB
Colleagues:
Has anyone written on the phrase mr̥tyóḥ padám (mr.tyo'h. pada'm) in the RV and AV (or later texts)? My cursory search has come up short.
Does death leave a footprint behind (possessive or subjective genitive)? Or are the footprints left by the living for death to follow (objective genitive)? The latter seems to be the reasonable conclusion, but it's not evident in the genitive phrase. The phrase appears in the RV's funeral hymn (10.18.2), where the living wipe out "death's footprint" when they return home, which suggests they erase their own trail so death can't follow them, but in stanza 1 death is banished along his own faraway/distant/remote path (which is different to the gods), which suggests that death does follow (and leave?) his own footprints or trail. Perhaps it's some kind of "plenary" genitive indicating both possibilities...
Happy New Year!
JW
Jarrod Whitaker, Ph.D.
Associate Professor,
Graduate Program Director,
Department for the Study of Religions.
Faculty, Department of Women's,
Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Wake Forest University
P.O. Box 7212
Winston-Salem, NC 27109
whitakjl@wfu.edu
p 336.758.4162
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