TolkAppiyar tradition, and Buddha, Socrates, ...

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Sri. LS wrote:

>There's a small question here relating to history of writing in

>Tamil. If one allows that Tolkappiar devised the Tamil syllabary,

>then the negative letter called puLLi could not have been "another

>achievement of his".

 

 

It's true that even the name, tolkAppiyar may be fiction,

but Tamil grammatical tradition encoded in the great grammar

is attributed to tolkAppiyar.

 

I think in the ancient old world this is rather a common

phenomenon, and is true even for Buddha, Socrates, Jesus, Laozi,

.... Pl. see the attached messages by S. Farmer in the Indology

archives.

 

BTW, one of the best treatments of the central importance of

orality in Tamil culture related with TolkAppiyam is:

 

Kersenboom, Saskia.

Word, sound, image : the life of the Tamil text

Oxford, OX ; Washington, DC : Berg Publishers, 1995.

Book

Computer File

xx, 259 p. : ill. ; 22 cm. + 1 computer optical

disc (4 3/4 in.)

 

This book, along with interactive CD, discusses Tamil orality,

and, surely will throw more light on how the syllabaries arose in

India, in Panini and Tolkappiyar.

 

Regards,

N. Ganesan

 

<<<

 

Thu, 6 Jul 2000 10:31:14 -0700

Indology <INDOLOGY

Sender: Indology <INDOLOGY

Steve Farmer <saf

Re: 16th century European contacts with Hinduism

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

 

I wrote, about an ancient story that circulated about "Socrates"

being put down by an Indian wiseman:

 

> In extant documents, this *particular* story first shows up in the

>4th century CE -- nearly 800 years after the death of "Socrates"!

 

Nanda Chandran responded:

 

> That itself need not invalidate the story. Even the Buddhist canon

> that we have now was put down in writing centuries after the

>historic Buddha. Still we accept that as his teachings.

 

That does invalidate the story. Already by the mid 4th century BCE --

let alone 800 years later -- "Socrates" (who supposedly died in 399

BCE) was for all practical purposes a fictional character who existed

only in the covers of wannabe Platonic dialogues. Compare sometime

Xenophon's "Socrates" with the "Socrates" of different dialogues in

the Platonic corpus -- not all of which were probably written by same

members of the early Platonic school -- or with the stories told

about Socrates in Diogenes Laertes.

 

Same for a lot of other eponymous figures, I might add ("Thus I have

heard...").

 

:^)

>>>

 

Also:

 

http://listserv.liv.ac.uk/cgi-shl/WA.EXE?A2=ind0009&L=indology&P=R9693

 

<<<

I'd like to start by emphasizing that I'm far from

dogmatic on the biographical issue - in my post I was

poking sticks in hornets' nests to see what would come out (a

comparative historian's trick to get data fast) - and wouldn't

seriously compare my knowledge of early Buddhist texts

with those of specialists like Lance Cousins or others on

this list.

 

This said, I'm not convinced at all that

belief or doubt about traditional accounts of the life

of "the Buddha" has much to do with specialized knowledge of

Buddhist texts. It concerns instead methodological attitudes

 

about what *kinds* of evidence are acceptable in reconstructing

ancient biographies. If the situation is radically different

in the case of "the Buddha" than in the case of "Confucius,"

"Aristotle,Jesus," etc., I'd appreciate it if Lance or

someone else could point out the circumstances

that make it unique in comparative history in ancient times.

 

I wrote:

 

>In general, ...I take arguments about the

>historicity of "the Buddha" with deep skepticism, since ancient

>biographies of figures like this (cf. "Confucius,Aristotle,"

>"Jesus," etc.) were invariably late constructs.

>>>