Brahmin Speaks, Tries to Explain: Priestcraft and Concessive Sentences in an Early Buddhist Text

This study explores some of the connections between the presentation of religious ideas and the use of concessive clauses and sentences in Pāli Buddhist literature. Special emphasis is placed on the linguistic construction kiñcāpi . . . atha kho . . . . Although this is widely understood to be a concessive and correlative construction and is often translated in ways that adequately reproduce the meaning of the Pāli, still it is the case that the kiñcāpi . . . atha kho . . . construction is sometimes misrepresented. Surprisingly, misrepresentations of said construction are especially prevalent in an ever-growing body of work related to one Pāli text in particular, the Tevijja Sutta. This has helped to obscure the extent to which the sutta is a response to developments in Brahmanical theology external to the text itself. This study examines this unwelcome situation and proposes a remedy.