A Dictionary of Pali: Part I, a--kh.

• Author: Collins, Steven
• Position: Reviews of Books - Book Review

A Dictionary of Pali: Part I, a--kh. By MARGARET CONE. Oxford: PALI TEXT SOCIETY, 2001. Pp. xxiv + 778. [pounds sterling]25.

It is a privilege and a delight to be able to welcome an historic publication, the first volume of Margaret Cone's eagerly awaited Dictionary of Pali (= DOP). One should perhaps not say that this is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, since Pali texts repeatedly remind us that nothing is forever. But a thing of beauty it certainly is, and along with the other volumes it will be obligatory for all students of Pali long after the writer and readers of this review have reached the end of their present incarnations. It is given to very few scholars to make such a deep mark in the sands. Cone's preface gives a succinct and lucid account of the history of Pali lexicography, which can be found at greater length in her I. B. Horner lecture for 1995, published as "Lexicography, Pali, and Pali Lexicography," in Journal of the Pali Text Society 22 (1996): 1-34 (= "the article") an informative, witty, and on occasion quite moving survey. The article conveys in a restrained but vivid manner the enormous, quiet, and mostly unrecognized labor required of a lexicographer, a topic modestly absent in the dictionary. Anyone who has tried to track down words in Pali texts, scarcely any of which have adequate indices, will appreciate and be grateful for the industry even a simple list of references involves. Cone gives us far more. DOP renders obsolete the Pali Text Society's Pali-English Dictionary (= PED), or will do so when it is complete. The Critical Pali Dictionary (= CPD) remains useful, indeed indispensable, but how many cycles of samsara will pass before it is finished is anyone's guess. Its first fascicule was published in 1924, anticipating completion in fifteen years. In 2001 it reached kamadhatu.

In the article Cone refers as predecessors to the Sanskrit Nighantu, Yaska's Nirukta, and Amarasimha, and in Pali to some sections of the Vinaya, the Niddesa (a commentary to parts of the Sutta Nipata early enough to have been included in the Pali Tipitaka), the exegetical works Petakopadesa and Nettipakarana, perhaps from the early centuries of the first millennium A.D., and the still useful twelfth century Abhidhanappadipika, written in Sri Lanka. I think one might add the first work in the canonical Abhidhamma, the Dhamma-sangani. This has minced around the English-speaking world in Edwardian dress as "Buddhist Psychological Ethics," a typical piece of Mrs. Rhys Davidsian enthusiasm, but a more accurate title would be "The Classification of Phenomena." One of its major organizing principles, though not its only one, is the listing of terms followed by a number of synonyms. The textual category Abhidhamma (and still more so Abhidharma) came to include many other styles of composition, but this kind of classificatory list-making continued to play a...