Pali: A Grammar of the Language of the Theravada Tipitaka, With a Concordance to Pischel's Grammatik der Prakrit-Sprachen.

• Author: Collins, Steven
• Position: Book Review

Pali: A Grammar of the Language of the Theravada Tipitaka, With a Concordance to Pischel's Grammatik der Prakrit-Sprachen. By THOMAS OBERLIES. Indian Philology and South Asian Studies, vol. 3. Berlin: DE GRUYTER, 2001. Pp. xviii + 385. $142.25.

This is a very learned and very odd book. Its learning is evident on every page. Oberlies is very familiar with Pali texts, although his confident lists of references occasionally contain errors of omissions or commission, and he also knows very well the main European secondary sources on Pali and Prakrit. He sheds light on almost all topics he discusses, and hacking one's way through the undergrowth almost always leads to clearings worth taking the trouble to find. Any serious student of Pali should consult this book, and buy it if it appears in paperback. Unfortunately a number of factors militate against the usefulness of the book. The layout is badly done: the numbering of sections, subsections, and sub-subsections, the use of typographical conventions and indentation, and the rather rambling, garrulous style tend to induce exasperation and headaches. The book is not a "grammar" in any ordinary sense of the word, since although it offers many paradigms it does not do so comprehensively, and it has little explanatory material of a conventional sort. The foreword (p. ix), as is usual and appropriate, laments that there has been no really new Pali grammar since Geiger's classic Pali Literatur und Sprache in 1916. The first version of the English translation of Geiger, by B. Ghosh in 1933 with revisions, was not at all easy to use. In 1994 the Pali Text Society republished Ghosh's version, further revised and edited by K. R. Norman (and again with further revisions in 2000), which has made things much easier for students, intellectually and financially, but the work is still a rebarbative series of paradigms connected by those passages listing examples, details, and exceptions. Oberlies' book is in the same mold. At the current price only the most dedicated and specialist libraries will be likely to buy it, which is a shame. The second volume in the same series, Oskar von Hinuber's A Handbook of Pali Literature (1996), was prohibitively expensive when it first appeared, but was later made available as a reasonably-priced paperback. Let us hope that the same occurs in the case of volume three.

It may be helpful here, so as to situate Oberlies' contribution, to review very briefly the field of Pali...