ABSTRACT
Commentaries were probably needed from the very beginning of Buddhism. We can assume that the earliest form of commentary was simply the explanation of one word by another, and we need not doubt that the Buddha on occasion replaced words by synonyms, to make his teachings more easily understood. We find some sort of evidence of this in the words of the Buddha himself, where he gives, for example, seven different words all meaning “bowl”,1 which he says are “country language” (janapadanirutti). This is presumably something which he found from experience, i.e. as he moved from one place to another, he found that the word used for a particular object in one area was quite different from that used in another area for one and the same thing. Anyone who has ever looked at Sir George Grierson’s Bihar Peasant Life,2 will know exactly the problems which the Buddha faced. Grierson moved around the area for which he had responsibility as a civil servant, recording the wide range of different names which the villagers of Bihar used for all the items of everyday domestic and village life. The Buddha must have found a situation which was very similar to this 21/2 millennia ago.
