Buddhist Etymologies from First-Millennium India and China: Works by Vasubandhu, Sthiramati, and Paramārtha

Indian Buddhist textual production—championed under a missionary ideology that resisted the Brahmanical rhetoric of the exclusivity of Sanskrit—has always conceived of itself as operating within and targeting a diversified multilingual context. Under this framework, Sanskrit etymological analysis was not primarily about revealing an underlying intrinsic structure of language, nor was it a means for gaining insight into the temporal dimension of language (as in the case of historical etymology). Rather than a way of excavating semantic meaning, it was utilized as a way to negotiate and create meaning in commentarial praxis. The text excerpts below examine, as a case study, some Buddhist etymological glosses of the Sanskrit word śāstra (treatise) in Abhidharma and Yogācāra texts from around the first half of the first millennium CE. Demonstrating the Buddhist use of etymology primarily as an interpretative, tradition-making, commentarial tool they help to explain how this approach enabled the carrying over of Sanskrit etymologies across languages (in the case before us, into Chinese).