“Akālaka”: a Lexical Phantom in Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit
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Abstract
Franklin Edgerton’s work on Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit (BHS) was groundbreaking for its time. With his grammar, dictionary, and reader, published in 1953, he made a strong case for his claim that “BHS is not Sanskrit”. But following their publication, both the grammar and the dictionary were subject to heated debates by scholars of Buddhist texts; some accused Edgerton of being too accepting of words and grammatical forms that were merely scribal errors or borrowings from contemporary vernacular languages, since many of the text editions that he used were based on only a handful of manuscripts, or even on a single fragment. This article will take up the BHS entry on the word “akālaka” and show that all three references cited for it – from the Divyāvadāna, the Mahāvastu, and the Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra – are unreliable. Parallels in other Sanskrit as well as Pali texts reveal that the word is merely the result of scribal error, on the one hand, and mistaken emendations by editors of critical texts, on the other. When these errors were compounded, the word became codified by Edgerton as a dictionary entry – with what seemed like evidence from multiple sources – and was cited by later scholars. This case study raises a number of interesting questions about lexicography, especially of such “hybrid” languages – how can we reliably separate mistakes from “genuine” readings? What does it even mean for a word to be “genuine” or “false”, and how might we re-imagine dictionaries to take into account the uncertainties inherent in their source material?
How to Cite
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Buddhism, Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit, Divyāvadāna, lexicography, Mahāvastu, Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra, manuscript studies, Pali, philology, Sanskrit
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