[Buddha-l] RE: seeking the Pali and Sanskrit termfor"holy/religious/, sacred objects"

[Stephen Hodge]

Dear Richard,

> I'm going to forfeit (I don't enjoy games of this sort at all). [snip] But 
> if you need to claim
> victory in this contest of pedantry, I'll be happy to cede it: you win. 
> You're more pedantic than
> I am.
Perhaps you've had a hard day today, but you seem to be over-reacting -- I 
am sorry for this since it is untypical of you..  I don't see this as a 
contest and I do not see it as a matter of pedantics -- you were the one who 
introduced the word.  To re-cap, without labouring the point unnecessarily, 
you seemed to express some disappointment that the "puuja-pari.skaaraa.h" 
section of the MVtti only dealt with the materiel of puujas.  I then pointed 
out that the Tibetan was mistranslated with regards to "yo-byad" -- with a 
valid warming about Korosi.  You then introduced your theory that 
"pari.skaaraa.h" does or could connote the standard Sanskrit sense of 
"ornaments" or "adornments", which I countered with Edgerton who gives the 
same equivalent as I do for pari.skaara (yo-byad), which leads me to believe 
(given Edgerton's lexical crtieria) that that meaning which, to my mind, 
fits the MVtti entry better is a special Buddhist usage.

With all due respect to you (and not in a competitive, point-scoring 
spirit), I think you are wrong.  No shame in that -- I get things wrong too 
sometimes.  That the Edgerton / Hodge rendering is closwer to the intended 
connotation is suggested by the Tibetan word yo-byad itself, but also from 
the numerous independent occasions in Chinese, known for more flexible 
textual translations, where pari.skaara even used on its *own* is translated 
as "things for offering / things to make offerings with".  I have not been 
able to find any non-Buddhist occurence or citation of puuja-pari.skaara, 
but note that puuja-sa.mbhaara and puujopakara.na are quite common -- I 
would thus suggest that all three terms are virtually synonymous.  To 
translate as you suggest with "ornaments", just seems to introduce 
unnecessary obfuscation -- I tend to think that the Chinese and Tibetan 
translators knew what they were doing.

Sorry if you find all this unintendedly pedantic, but you know that 
lexicography is one of my interests.  If Sally is trying to be precise in 
her understanding of possible Buddhist terms that meet her criteria, then an 
accurate rendering of each term would seem to be useful.

So cheer up and don't take it all so personally !

Best wises,
Stephen Hodge