Part 11 - Exercise 9 Answers
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The full phrase is asura-kāyā hāyanti. The meaning being that the number of Asuras is decreasing.
Hāyanti is passive.
This is an example of an equational sentence. These sentences (or phrases or clauses) have the structure ‘A is B‘, where A and B are in the same case. In the present example ayaṃ, sā, and paññā are all nominatives. In the Pali the verb 'to be' is often left out in these constructions (see Warder p.14), as in the present example.
Esā agrees with taṇhā, both being feminine nominative singular. Esā is thus a demonstrative pronoun (see Warder p.30) qualifying taṇhā: ‘this craving‘.
Pahīyati is passive.
Bhāsitā is a past participle and the sentence is passive (as is usually the case with past participles). In these cases the agent is in the instrumental (here te ), the patient in the nominative case (here vācā ), and the past participle agrees with the patient like an adjective. Thus bhāsitā agrees with vācā (feminine nominative singular). Esā is a demonstrative pronoun qualifying and agreeing with vācā .
Te , instrumental agent of the past participle (passive construction), see Warder pp.41-42.
Idaṃ is the patient of the passive verb vuccati and thus appears in the nominative case.
Note how vā, ‘or‘, is repeated for each word it connects. This is a typical feature of Pali.
Cittan and viññāṇan are nominatives, which is the normal case for quoted words, see Warder p.14. The final ṃ is changed to n because of the following ti, see Warder p.217.
Devatā is nominative feminine, either plural or singular. But because devatā is nominative and thus the agent of the verb avocuṃ (aorist third person plural), it must be plural. Tā is the feminine nominative plural demonstrative pronoun, qualifying and agreeing with devatā.
Avocuṃ here takes two patients in the accusative, i.e. said something (etad, ‘this‘) to someone (maṃ, ‘me‘), see Warder p.18.
Atthi at the beginning of a sentence often emphasizes the existence of something, see Warder p.31.
Vijjā , lit. ‘knowledge‘.
Nāma , lit. ‘by name‘, is an indeclinable not a verb. But I translate with a verb to improve the readability.
Vijjā and maṇikā are feminine nominative singulars. There can be no patient in a sentence where the only verb is atthi , ‘to be‘.
Lit. ‘are stopped‘. The construction is passive, and the past participle niruddhā is plural to agree with the sum of the two patients (saññā and vedanā ), see Warder p.26. The auxiliary verb honti is therefore also plural, see Warder p.54 note 2.
Kālakatā , ‘died‘, is a past participle agreeing with upāsikā , ‘female lay disciple‘. Note that here the past participle is active (kālakatā is intransitive, i.e. it does not take a direct patient) and that it therefore agrees with the agent, Sujāta ... upāsikā , rather than the patient. See Warder p.40.
Vuccamāno , present participle of the passive verb vuccati . Being passive it agrees with its patient Sunakkhatto . When constructing a passive present participle in English, first make the verb passive, i.e. ‘speak‘ becomes ‘is spoken‘, and then turn it into a present participle, ‘being spoken‘. Note that for a passive construction the ‘-ing‘ ending of the present participle goes with ‘to be‘ rather than the main verb.
Note that apakkami is the aorist of apakkamati, not pakkamati. (in any case, they are close in meaning.) Sunakkhatta is the object of vuccamāno but the subject of apakkami.
1A magic science for thought-reading.
2As here, hū is sometimes used as an "auxiliary" verb with a past particle: "are stopped", "have ceased." This construction is described as "'periphrastic", and is equivalent to a single passive verb. It is much more commonly used than the latter.
3Cf. kālam akāsi in Exercise 4 (opens in new tab); here kāla is compounded with the participle, the whole functioning grammatically as a past participle.
Note that vuccati is a passive verb and therefore that it takes patients in the nominative. Thus both 'ayaṃ' and 'samaṇo' are patients, and vuccati must be a verb that can take two patients, see Warder p.18.