Evam maya srutam
|--By Sramanerika Heng Hsien|
Mastering this Sanskrit lesson will enable you to pick up any
Buddhist sutra and begin to read. Why? Every sutra spoken by the Buddha
begins with the words ‘Thus I have heard’.
“Fine,” you think, “but isn’t there a contradiction in those words? The last lesson explained the Sutra’s invocation. Namah Sarvajnaya, ‘Homage to (the Buddha) the one who knows all’. If the Buddha is all-knowing, how can he say; ‘I’ve heard’?”
Quite right. The Buddha indeed:
Is omniscient (sarvajna) and self-taught,
Only the Buddha is beyond instruction, because there is not one thing he doesn’t know. Therefore the Buddha would not begin a sutra by saying, “So I’ve heard.
But it’s not the Buddha who says the words ,
it’s Ananda, the Buddha’s cousin and disciple, who speaks them. After the Buddha
entered Nirvana, the disciples met to assemble the Buddha’s teachings,
and because Ananda could remember every word the Buddha had said, it was
he who recited the sutras for the assembly. At the beginning of each
sutra Ananda said, “Thus I have heard”.
The Sanskrit, which says this somewhat differently from English, reads literally, “Thus by me it was heard.”
The meaning of the Sanskrit can often be conveyed by several different English words or phrases. Moreover it’s frequently the case that one single Sanskrit word is more loaded with meanings than any one corresponding English word. Giving several English translations suggests the range of meaning of the Sanskrit word.
The ending –a is a function marker; the word in –a functions as the person or thing by which the main action of the phrase is done. The hearing was done ‘by me’, and ‘me’ refers to Ananda.
When r and another consonant come together to form a cluster with no vowel in between, use form (1) if the r comes first; and if the r is second, use form (2). Notice that in figuring out how to pronounce consonant clusters, the order is :
The letter written first, either because it's on the left or because it's placed above, is the one that's pronounced first.4 srutam, a single word, gives all the information of the English, 'it was heard', much of which is contained in the ending. We'll learn more about the mysteries of Sanskrit word endings as we go along.
What Ananda heard and now recites is the Buddha Speaks of Amitabha Sutra, the Sutra which tells of Amitabha Buddha's Western Paradise, the Land of Ultimate Bliss. Can you write its name in Sanskrit?
Words to figure out:
1 C.F. L. de la Vallee
Poussin's translation into French of the
2 "Thus I have
heard" will be discussed in Vajra Bodhi Sea in
3 Don't get attached:
not every final -a is this ending, nor is
4 In the case of
evam, the .
which represents m does not mean