Buddhist Semantic Derivation in Early Buddhism: A Case Study

The Vedic knowledge form of semantic derivation is an indigenous commentarial method widely embraced across the Buddhist and Brahmanical traditions. These religious traditions utilized this method to elucidate their sacred texts, investing significant effort in reconfiguring the explanations to support their religious theory and practice. This paper delves into the diverse explanations found within the Gandhari commentaries, Pali texts, and Yaska’s Nirukta. It highlights how Buddhist texts in South Asia inherited these interpretations and showed traces of early sources in the Middle Indic forms. In the instance where a noun can be explained in a way that contradicts its current contextual usage, Buddhist commentators elaborated extensively in their commentaries to reconcile such contradictions. The study demonstrates that Buddhist semantic derivation has a longstanding tradition predating the early commentaries, consistently aligns with an underlying Buddhist ideological framework, and reflects an underlying understanding of the stable relationship between sound and its referent.