The Commentary on the Itivuttaka.

• Author: Egge, James
• Position: Book review

The Commentary on the Itivuttaka. By PETER MASEFIELD. Oxford: PALI TEXT SOCIETY, 2008 and 2009. Pp. xiv + 844 (2 vols.). [pounds sterling]45.

These two volumes comprise the first translation into a European language of the principal commentary on Itivuttaka, a text of the Pali canon. The Itivuttaka commentary, or Itivuttaka-atthakatha, is one of seven commentaries that make up Paramatthadipani, written by Dhammapala probably in the sixth or seventh century C.E. (p. xiii). Like the other Pali commentaries called atthakathas, Itivuttaka-atthakatha replaced the older Sinhala-language commentaries on which it was based to become the authoritative interpretation of its canonical root text for the Theravada tradition. This commentary consists almost entirely of explanations of words and phrases, and contains few long passages of narrative or doctrinal exposition.

Peter Masefield, who has previously published translations of Dhammapala"s commentaries on Vimana-vatthu and Udana, bases this translation on four editions of the Pali text published in Sinhala, Burmese, Thai, and Roman scripts. He generally follows M. M. Bose's Roman-script edition, which was originally published by the Pali Text Society in 1934 and 1936. Masefield notes when he adopts an alternate reading, but does not explain why he prefers one reading over another. Masefield's decision to privilege the PTS edition is questionable, because Bose did not have access to any Burmese texts, and based his edition on a Thai edition, a Sinhala edition, and a single Sinhala manuscript. Masefield does not provide complete bibliographical information for the editions he consults, identifying one simply as "Siamese edition" (p. vii).

The translation is largely a word-for-word rendering of the Pali text, which readers may find stilted and difficult to read. I will give three representative examples of Masefield's approach. He translates the clause seyyathapi ... yani kanici janymanam pananam padajatani sabbani tani hatthipade samodhanam gacchanti as "just as ... whatever types of feet mobile creatures may possess, all these reach collocation in the foot of the elephant" (p. 205). This translation allows Masefield to maintain a consistent translation for samodhana as 'collocation', but this wording is much less readable than Bhikkhu Bodhi's translation of the same words as "just as the footprints of all living beings that walk fit into the footprint of the elephant" (The Connected Discourses of the...