Miscellany – Notes on Aśoka Rescripts

Summary

In this philological note the author analyses the participial form dusaṃpaṭipādaye occurring in Aśoka’s rock edicts. Previous translators treated the word as an optative or future participle, but the author argues that it is in fact an adjectival derivative conveying the sense ‘hard to instruct’. By comparing similar formations in Pali and Sanskrit and examining the syntactic context of the edicts, he shows that the phrase refers to people who are difficult to train in righteousness. The note also discusses other verbal forms in the inscriptions, illustrating the linguistic diversity of Aśoka’s Prakrit and the challenges of translating it.