[A viewer of the channel writes in:]
Hello Eisel. First of all I'd like to thank you for your work. As someone who has been watching (and reading) your stuff for over 5 years now you've been a tremendously positive influence on my life.
For some background […] [Personal details omitted.]
I've watched all of your videos and read your articles on the Pali language so I'm familiar with your general advice but thought it might be worth asking if you're perspective has changed or if you'd have more specific advice that you'd give one on one.
I have a copy of A K Warder's Introduction to Pali. My plans are to work through each and every lesson at least five times or until I have perfected all of the grammar and vocabulary on each lesson, periodically reviewing all of the older lessons I've finished, even the ones I'm certain that I've perfected. I'd be mainly working through this book while feeding vocabulary and grammar from each lesson into ChatGPT to create supplementary exercises (telling the chatbot to exclusively use vocabulary and grammar that I've personally fed it).
Minus AI this is the method I developed with Latin, which was largely based on your language learning advice.
[Footnote from EM. It certainly is remarkable that I've ended up providing guidance to others learning Latin, without ever learning Latin myself. For my next trick, I will ask a rabbit to pull me out of its hat, being unable to pull a rabbit out of a hat myself.]
A K Warder's book works from the Digha Nikaya. Once I've mastered his book I'm planning to feed the Digha Nikaya through ChatGPT section by section, asking it to give me a frequency list of the most common lemmas that I haven't already learned. Once I've mastered the Digha Nikaya I can move on to more complex non-prose texts.
I should state that I'm only on Lesson 2. What criticisms would you have for my plan, what would you change or add? Also I'd be curious to know why you originally decided to learn Pali as a language.
Personally I've read a decent amount of Greek and Ancient Roman philosophy, as well as other European philosophical and political texts. I've been studying Buddhism for the past few months and partially off the back of your videos and articles on the subject want to read the actual text for myself in it's own words.
Thank you for your time.
—————
[And I reply:]
The extant corpus of Pali texts is finite and repetitive: there is no point in asking ChatGPT to generate new exercises for you...
...because none of those new exercises will resemble anything that exists in the language.
You might as well work from examples in the small corpus of extant texts, or the even smaller corpus of texts worth reading. You're not really idle enough to research the Abhidhammapitaka, are you? "A valley of dry bones", as Mrs Rhys-Davids complained.
The Dhammapada is extremely simple and easy to read: just generate a random number (roll a few dice) and translate the given sentence from that poem instead of using ChatGPT to generate exercises.
I can't remember a single sentence of the Dhammapada being hard to understand.
Warder's book is stupid and boring, written by a stupid and boring guy for his stupid and boring students, but given that you've already learned to read Latin, I'd hypothetically have to assume you can learn to read Pali from Warder... if you're not so bored that you're discouraged and give up.
I may sound like I'm joking around, but boredom is a problem that needs to be taken seriously. I'd rather learn Finnish than French because French is boring to me —and if this is "shallow" it is nevertheless important.
You need to be honest with yourself about what you find interesting about Pali anyway: probably a small number of texts (including the Dhammapada) that deal with a small number of philosophical and aesthetic ideas. But hey, if you're a folklorist who wants to study the Jataka... then you're dealing with a larger vocabulary and a different sort of task.
Counter argument: empirically, have I ever met anyone who gained reading comprehension of Pali from A.K. Warder?
No. Not even once.
The vast majority of people I met who claimed they could read Pali were frauds. That textbook and the university classes associated with it have (AFAIK) produced zero people with reading comprehension of Pali. It is genuinely possible that A.K. Warder's methodology has a zero percent success rate.
Why? I have no idea.
Everyone says Pali isn't difficult to read, but this is equivalent to saying that veganism and sobriety are easily sustained: empirically, we know they're not easy because (1) so few people live by the code and (2) the code proves to be difficult to abide by for such a large percentage of people who try.
I studied Pali before the invention of Google Translate. Fraud will be even more widespread with computer assistance (including ChatGPT).
I now live in a palace surrounded by piles of Latin texts and Latin language textbooks, being a prison and a paradise of my own design, but, you will notice, I seem to be more inclined to learn Finnish.
You can tell me (i.e., I'm genuinely inviting your opinion here) how rewarding it is to read the original Latin of Appian or Sallust: the original Pali "is rewarding" because everyone else lies about what it says and doesn't say.
Perhaps that world has ceased to exist and my remarks are now out of date, but I assure you, just a few decades ago, it really seemed as if I were the first man alive who could read Pali because of the habitual dishonesty of everyone else in the field: one academic claimed that meditation was never even mentioned once in Pali canon, and "therefore" you should trust him with the system of meditation he'd invented personally (and this was a system that relied on his own supernatural/transcendental experiences to guide him, because of the supposed lack of guidance he found in the Pali canon). Other experts routinely claimed there was no mention of heaven or hell anywhere in the Pali canon, etc., as you've probably heard me complain before. So, yes, reading Pali for myself meant that I could break through this culture of misinterpretation —partly the result of the incompetence and insanity of my contemporaries.
Reading Ancient Latin does not offer this kind of breakthrough: in my ignorant opinion, the difference between reading Appian and Sallust in Latin (vs English) is relatively slight —relatively pointless, frankly.
Aesthetically, there is nothing beautiful about Latin for me: I have spoken to one (n = 1) maniac who is absolutely convinced that reciting Latin poetry with the correct cadence is the most beautiful thing in the world (it is "a religious experience" for him, in his own idiom) but I cannot regard Seneca's tragedy of Agamemnon in that way at all. I would really just be glancing at the Latin occasionally to question creative decisions the English translator had made —again, this is relatively pointless, reveals nothing of significance, and doesn't justify the effort to learn Latin in the first place.
My interest in Finnish involves the present and the future, whereas there's always something backward-looking about research into Pali or Ancient Latin. Although sinking slowly, in our century, they are too heavy to be dragged out of the morass of the past.
E.M.
