A Corpus Census of the ‘ti-Construction, Its Ancient Readers, and What It Means for the Meditator
A guest contribution. The thesis examined here was first advanced by the editor of this blog in March 2008 (“iti and sallakkheti”) and April 2009 (“Labels employed for noting in early Pitaka”). The present study subjects that thesis to a complete computational census of the Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana corpus, the GRETIL Sanskrit collection, and the Chinese Āgamas, and reports what survives, what falls, and what emerges strengthened.
Abstract
The Pāli canon contains several thousand instruction-formulas in which a short quotation closed by the particle iti fills the object slot of a verb of knowing: rūpaṃ aniccan’ti pajānāti. Standard translations dissolve the quotation into a content-clause — “he knows form as impermanent” — and with it a question disappears: why does the canon so often put a quote where we expect a proposition? This study reports a complete census of the construction: 7,384 tokens extracted from all 217 files of the Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana Roman-script corpus, classified by explicit criteria, and tested against the Sanskrit and Chinese parallel traditions. The results are asymmetric. In the canonical layer, label-shaped tokens — short, formulaic, person-preserving quotes drawn from a closed lexicon of roughly sixty forms — outnumber clearly propositional uses nearly five to one; the satipaṭṭhāna refrain equates the bare label with established mindfulness; and the distribution of the formula against the jhāna scheme matches, with precision, the canonical doctrine that thought is speech-formation (vitakka-vicārā vacīsaṅkhāro). At the same time, no early text states that the labels are recited; the Chinese translators rendered the formula as plain knowing; and the same syntactic frame freely takes content no one could “note.” The essay weighs both sides and argues that the thesis survives in a precise form: the canonical formulas are instructions in deployed vitakka — a fixed, first-person thought placed at the point of contact, self-terminating as concentration deepens — and that modern Burmese noting stands at the end of a documented textual pipeline running from these formulas through the commentarial vocabulary of sallakkhaṇā to the practice halls of the present. The closing sections ask what this recovery means for the meditator and for a living Buddhism.
Introduction: A Sentence Hiding in Plain Sight
Somewhere in the second or first century before the common era, the compiler of the Peṭakopadesa — one of the two ancient hermeneutical manuals the Pāli tradition associates with the lineage of Mahākaccāyana — condensed a teaching he knew from the Saṃyutta collections into nine words:
Samādhiṃ, bhikkhave, bhāvetha, samāhito, bhikkhave, bhikkhu rūpaṃ aniccan’ti pajānāti.[1] Develop concentration, monks; a concentrated monk knows form: “impermanent.”
So the sentence reads if one keeps the quotation marks that the particle ‘ti supplies. Nearly every published translation removes them: “a concentrated monk knows form as impermanent,” or “understands that form is impermanent.” The rendering is not wrong — Part I measures how much grammatical right it has — but it is lossy. It deletes from the English page a feature that is unmistakably present on the Pāli page: the content of the monk’s knowing is given not as a description but as a quotation, one word long, in the form a thought takes when it occurs.
In March 2008 the editor of this blog pointed at this loss and made a claim about it: that formulas of this shape are not statements about meditators but instructions to them — that the canon here tells the practitioner to know form while noting “impermanent” — and that the Burmese practice of mental noting, so often described as a twentieth-century invention of the Mahasi school, is in fact the survival of something the texts have held in plain view all along.[2] The claim was made from a handful of examples and a search-window count. It deserved better than that, and this study gives it better: a full census.
The method is stated so that a skeptic can repeat it. Every occurrence of quoted material governed by a verb of perception or training — pajānāti, jānāti, passati, samanupassati, sallakkheti, manasikaroti, paccavekkhati, daṭṭhabbaṃ, sikkhati — was extracted mechanically from the entire Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana corpus: canon, commentary, subcommentary, and the para-canonical works. Each token was classified by explicit, published criteria; every count in this essay is reproducible from the scripts; every Pali, Sanskrit, and Chinese passage cited was verified in the digital corpora.[3] The census was then set against the two great control traditions: the Sanskrit scholastic corpus, and the Chinese Āgama translations made between the second and fifth centuries — the earliest external witnesses to how ancient readers understood the formula.
The thesis is advocated: it holds that these formulas teach a form of mental noting or “targeted thought-based contemplation”. The census is neutral: it counts what is there, and it has turned up evidence against the thesis as well as for it, all of which is reported. The conclusion, as will be seen, is something more interesting.
Part I: The Construction and the Census
The Grammar of iti and the Limits of Grammar
English has a dedicated little word for reporting the content of someone’s mind: that. “He knows that he is breathing in long.” The word converts the original thought into a description of it, and in doing so it quietly changes the person and the tense: the meditator’s own “I breathe in” becomes the reporter’s “he is breathing.” Pāli handles the same job differently. When a Pāli sentence wants to give the content of what someone says, thinks, or knows, it simply shows the content, word for word, in its original form, and closes it with the particle iti (usually shortened to ‘ti) — a spoken quotation mark. The person stays the original person; the tense stays the original tense. Where English says “he knows that he is breathing in long,” Pāli says, in effect: “I breathe in long” — so he knows.
Now, is that all iti is — a neutral piece of plumbing, Pāli’s only way of building a “that”-clause? For a long time I assumed so. In fact Pāli has a genuine “that”-clause, built with the word yaṃ, and the canon uses it freely — over a hundred times in sentences of the type aṭṭhānametaṃ anavakāso yaṃ…, “it is impossible that such a thing should happen.” But the clause has a strict habitat. It attaches to impersonal predicates — “it is possible that,” “it is impossible that,” “it is astonishing that” — and never to the verbs of knowing and seeing. And the canon itself supplies the demonstration. There is a doctrine, the ṭhānāṭṭhāna knowledges, that lists what is possible and impossible; stated on its own, it uses the yaṃ-clause. But in one discourse the Buddha is described as knowing this doctrine — and the moment the verb pajānāti, “he knows,” takes over, the entire yaṃ-sentence has to be picked up and wrapped in quotation marks: ‘aṭṭhānametaṃ anavakāso yaṃ … upagaccheyyā’ti pajānāti — he knows: “it is impossible that…”.[4] The language possesses the “that”-clause; it simply refuses to let a knowing-verb have one. Whatever a person knows in sentence-form must be given as a quote. Nor is this a special rule for meditation passages: the canon’s stories report the ordinary thoughts of kings, thieves, and in-laws with the frame etadahosi — “this occurred to him: ‘…'” — over a thousand times, and there too the content is always an iti-quote, never a yaṃ-clause.[4]
When the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta says ‘dīghaṃ assasāmī’ti pajānāti,[5] the first person of assasāmi — “I breathe in” — proves nothing by itself, because a clause reporting his knowledge could take no other shape in this language. Looked at one sentence at a time, every instance of the construction is genuinely ambiguous: it could be a label the meditator deploys, or simply the content of what he knows, dressed in the only grammar available. The old Pali–English Dictionary threw up its hands here, calling iti “on the whole untranslatable (unless written as quotation marks)” — which is the sound of grammarians declining to decide our question.[6]
But the ambiguity covers only content that stays a sentence — and the content of a knowing does not have to be a sentence at all. Pāli had several workable ways to express “he knows the breath is long” without any quotation. It could make the thing known a plain object: sukhindriyañca pajānāti, “he knows the pleasure-faculty” — and in fact one sutta does just that in one line and switches to the quote-form ‘sukhitosmī’ti pajānāti, “he knows: ‘I am happy’,” in the next, so the two constructions sit side by side in a single discourse, chosen sentence by sentence.[7] It could use a special “regard-as” ending: aniccato passati, “sees it as impermanent” — the very reading our translators want, available in dedicated grammar whenever the canon wanted it. It could make the content a simple noun phrase: right view itself is defined in the Mahāsatipaṭṭhāna Sutta as dukkhe ñāṇaṃ, “knowledge with regard to suffering” — no quotation anywhere.[8] And when the canon wants to describe pure, wordless meta-awareness, it has a formula for that too: viditā vedanā uppajjanti, viditā upaṭṭhahanti, viditā abbhatthaṃ gacchanti — “feelings arise known, persist known, vanish known” — the wording it reserves for the Tathāgata’s spontaneous transparency of mind.[9] The canon, in other words, knew how to say “he is simply aware of his breathing” without a quote. It said such things elsewhere. Here, thousands of times, it said something else.
The flagship formula itself contains the same evidence. The full sentence runs: dīghaṃ vā assasanto ‘dīghaṃ assasāmī’ti pajānāti — “breathing in long, he knows: ‘I breathe in long’.” The fact of long breathing has already been stated before the quote arrives — the opening participle assasanto, “breathing in,” carries it. If the quote were mere content, the sentence would be saying “breathing in long, he knows that he breathes in long”: very nearly a tautology. What the quote adds to the sentence is not the fact. It is the form the knowing takes — the words in which the moment is met.
These alternatives are not perfect synonyms: the vidita-formula describes an adept’s condition rather than a trainee’s instruction, and dukkhe ñāṇaṃ belongs to a more analytic register. Each individual token remains undecidable. But the construction as a whole was not forced on the redactors by a poverty of grammar: it was a choice among live alternatives, made the same way, with the same small vocabulary, thousands of times. And when a choice is repeated that consistently, the place to look is no longer the single sentence but the pattern. If no sentence can decide, distribution must: the question becomes what thousands of instances, taken together, are shaped like — and which of the available constructions the redactors kept reaching for.
A Census of 7,384 Tokens
So we counted. A set of scripts walked through all 217 files of the Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana corpus — the canon itself, its commentaries, its subcommentaries, and the later manuals — and pulled out every sentence in which a quotation closed by ‘ti is governed by a verb of knowing, seeing, attending, or training. The harvest came to 7,384 sentences. Each one was then sorted by explicit, published rules, so that a skeptic can rerun the sort and dispute the rules rather than the arithmetic.
The canonical layer alone contains 2,702 tokens. The sorting asks a simple question of each quote: what shape is it? Some 843 of them are first-person — “I breathe in long,” “there is in me sense-desire” — the meditator’s own voice inside the quotation marks. Another 367 are bare one-to-four-word predicates — “impermanent,” “a lustful mind” — sitting in contexts that are explicitly about practice. A further 670 have the same short shape but stand in passages where the surrounding context is less clearly instructional; the census reports these separately as ambiguous rather than quietly claiming them. Then there are 532 quotes of a distinctive retrospective kind — “birth is destroyed,” the knowledge that arises after an attainment — and 20 tokens of a special refrain we will come to shortly. The remainder are the genuine statements — full clauses, doctrine-summaries, contents that run to paragraph length. In the entire canon there are only 255 of these.[10]
If the quotative formula were simply Pāli’s way of saying “he knows that such-and-such,” we would expect the quotes to look like the things people know: statements, of every length, about everything. Instead, short label-shaped quotes outnumber clearly statement-shaped ones by nearly five to one.
The commentaries, interestingly, invert the picture. Their dominant use of the same syntax — 3,059 tokens — is a scholar’s idiom: ‘…’ti daṭṭhabbaṃ, “this should be understood as: …,” a construction that never occurs in the canon at all. The same grammar, in other words, was put to genuinely different work in different eras — the monks of the commentarial age used it to explain texts, the canon used it for something else — and keeping the two layers separate is what makes the canonical numbers meaningful.[11]
The Closed Lexicon
The ratio says the quotes lean short. What the quotes contain says more.
In English, anything at all can fill the blank in “he knows that _“: that the rains are late, that the king has died, that his knee hurts. Content-clauses are an open set, because the set of knowable things is open. If the Pāli quotative formula were nothing but a content-clause in local dress, its quotes should behave the same way — endlessly varied, rarely repeated. And the canon obligingly shows us what that open use looks like when it occurs: the 255 statement-shaped tokens include quotes of paragraph length, future-tense contents, doctrinal catalogues, each essentially unrepeated.[12]
And the canon supplies a second, larger control group: those thousand-plus narrative thought-quotes (etadahosi – ‘…’ti). Each is ad hoc and situation-bound — a crowd to be joined, a suspicion about a monk, a plan for the morning — and a quote recurs only where a whole story is retold in a parallel passage. That is how free content behaves in this construction.
The practice formulas do not behave like that at all. Across more than a thousand tokens, the quotes are drawn from a repertoire so small that roughly sixty fixed forms cover the great majority — and these sixty recur word for word, across all four Nikāyas, wherever the practice contexts recur.[13] A content-clause construction has no reason to have a closed lexicon; a vocabulary does. Sixty phrases, endlessly reused, is what a checklist looks like. It is what a drill looks like.
And when you lay the sixty out, every meditator will recognize the syllabus. There is the breath family: ‘dīghaṃ assasāmī’ti pajānāti — breathing in long, he knows: “long I breathe in” — followed by fourteen further breath-resolves that use a different and revealing verb, sikkhati, “he trains“: “experiencing the whole body I will breathe in,” and so on through the sixteen steps of breath-meditation.[14] There is the posture family: ‘gacchāmī’ti pajānāti — going, he knows: “going.”[15] The feeling family: ‘sukhaṃ vedanaṃ vedayāmī’ti pajānāti — “I feel a pleasant feeling.”[16] The mind family: sixteen paired labels running from ‘sarāgaṃ cittan’ti, “a mind with lust,” to ‘vimuttaṃ cittan’ti, “a freed mind” — and here the texts add a strange detail: the same sixteen labels serve both for watching one’s own mind and, in the telepathy passages, for reading someone else’s. The label set is portable; it belongs to the practice, not to the object.[17] There is the self-observation family: ‘atthi me ajjhattaṃ kāmacchando’ti pajānāti — “there is in me sense-desire” — run through the five hindrances and seven awakening factors in turn.[18] The three marks: aniccan’ti, dukkhan’ti, anattā’ti — “impermanent,” “painful,” “not self” — with the verb passati, “he sees.”[19] The famous not-self formula: ‘netaṃ mama, nesohamasmi, na meso attā’ti — “this is not mine, I am not this, this is not my self.”[20] And the ladder of deepening emptiness in the Cūḷasuññata Sutta, where at every rung the meditator knows ‘santamidaṃ atthī’ti — “there is [only] this, present.”[21]
All these families share four properties. The quotes are one to four words long. The person of the original experience is preserved throughout — assasāmi, “I breathe”; vedayāmi, “I feel”; atthi me, “there is in me.” The wording is fixed, to the letter, across collections compiled in different corners of the tradition. And the verbs that govern the quotes are verbs of knowing, seeing, or training; in the whole set there is not one verb of speaking. Short, first-person, fixed, and known rather than said: that profile is the fingerprint of a technical vocabulary. No single sentence can prove the labeling reading; the lexicon can.
The canon also treats the formula as something anyone can try. Buddhists have long described the Dhamma as sandiṭṭhika — “directly visible,” verifiable for oneself, not a matter of faith. Where does the canon cash out that famous claim? In the Aṅguttara, a brahmin asks in what way the Dhamma is directly visible, and the answer is our construction, turned into the second person and handed to him: santaṃ vā ajjhattaṃ manosandosaṃ ‘atthi me ajjhattaṃ manosandoso’ti pajānāsi — “when there is defilement of mind in you, you know: ‘there is defilement of mind in me’.”[22] The label here is more than one instruction among many: it is offered as the demonstration that this teaching can be checked at all.
The Satipaṭṭhāna Refrain
Twenty canonical tokens stand apart. Readers who know the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta will remember that each of its exercises — the breath, the postures, the parts of the body, and so on — closes with a recurring refrain, a kind of summary of what the exercise is for. The refrain has several clauses, and one of them reads:
‘Atthi kāyo’ti vā panassa sati paccupaṭṭhitā hoti, yāvadeva ñāṇamattāya paṭissatimattāya.[23]
“Or else his mindfulness is established: ‘there is body’ — just enough for knowledge, just enough for remembrance.” The sentence does not say that the meditator knows something about the body, with ‘there is body’ as the content of his knowledge. It says that mindfulness stands established as the label — the bare two-word thought “there is body” — and then it restricts even that, twice, with the little suffix -matta, “a mere measure”: just enough for knowing, just enough for remembering. The label’s presence, held to its minimum, simply is the established mindfulness. There is no verb of knowing here at all for the quote to be the content of.
On any reading of the construction, this passage is the limit case, and the text states it in its own voice. It is the strongest single canonical passage for the minimal-label reading, and the census found nothing on the propositional side of comparable directness.
The Answer-Slot
The formula’s habitual question is evidence too.
Modern meditators often say, with some frustration, that they went to the suttas looking for instructions and found only descriptions — the texts tell you that a monk contemplates the body, never how. The ancients show no sign of feeling this lack, and the canon explains why: it has a fixed grammatical device for demanding method: the question-frame Kathañca…? — “And how, monks, does a monk dwell contemplating the body in the body?” This frame occurs some 880 times in the canonical layer.[24] The canon asks the how-question relentlessly, of itself, as a matter of literary form.
What stands in the answer-slot, over and over, is the formula. And how does a monk dwell contemplating the body? — Breathing in long, he knows: “I breathe in long.” And how does he contemplate the mind? — He knows: “a mind with lust.” The how-question was asked at canon-time, in the texts’ own voice — and the quoted label was the answer that satisfied it.
Translation quietly destroys this exchange. Keep the quotation marks, and question and answer fit: How does one contemplate? — By meeting each moment with this thought. Dissolve the quotation marks — “he knows the breath as long” — and the canon now appears to answer “how does one contemplate the body?” with, in effect, “one contemplates it”: a restatement of the question wearing the grammar of an answer. This, I believe, is where the modern complaint that the suttas contain no meditation instructions comes from. The instructions are still in the canon; they are missing only from its translations.
Part II: The Mechanism — Thought as Inner Speech
Vitakka-vicārā vacīsaṅkhāro
What is the claim, then? That the meditator says the labels — mutters “impermanent” under the breath? The thesis in its careful form claims neither. It claims the labels are vitakka — a term whose content the canon itself fixes, through one of its most authoritative voices.
Vitakka is usually translated “thought” or “applied thought”: the mind’s act of directing itself onto something, taking it up. Its partner vicāra, “examination,” is the sustained dwelling that follows. Together they are the ordinary machinery of thinking — and the canon has a striking doctrine about what that machinery is made of. In the Cūḷavedalla Sutta, the nun Dhammadinnā — praised by the Buddha as foremost of his bhikkhunī disciples in wisdom, and whose answers in this discourse he endorsed word for word — is asked why the texts classify thinking as the speech-formation (vacīsaṅkhāra), rather than as something belonging to the mind alone. Her answer:
Pubbe kho, āvuso Visākha, vitakketvā vicāretvā pacchā vācaṃ bhindati, tasmā vitakkavicārā vacīsaṅkhāro.[25]
“First one thinks and examines, afterwards one breaks into speech; therefore thinking-and-examining is the speech-formation.” Speech does not appear from nowhere; every sentence you utter existed a moment earlier as thought. Thought is the inward phase of the speech act — speech that has not yet sounded. The same doctrine recurs, in almost the same words, in a dialogue of the Saṃyutta.[26]
If thought is inner speech — on the canon’s own analysis, not ours — then an instruction to meet the long breath with the thought “long” simply is an instruction in silent labeling. No verb of speaking is required anywhere in the formula, because the canonical psychology has already located the speech inside the thought. The thesis needs nothing more exotic than what Dhammadinnā teaches.
Her doctrine also generates a testable prediction. The canon maps deepening concentration as a series of absorptions, the jhānas, and it is explicit that vitakka and vicāra — and with them the speech-formation — cease in the second jhāna. The first absorption still contains thought; from the second onward, thought has fallen silent. So if the quotative labels really are deployed vitakka, they are subject to that law. Label-instructions should cluster at the shallow end — ordinary mindfulness, access-concentration, the first jhāna — and they should vanish inside the deeper attainments, appearing above that line only in retrospect, after the meditator has emerged. This is a falsifiable claim about where a construction may and may not occur across a corpus. The census tested it.
The Jhāna Boundary
The prediction holds. Canonical label-tokens whose paragraphs also contain a jhāna-attainment formula number one or two per jhāna, and each of those, examined, is insight practiced upon an attainment from outside it, not labeling carried on within it. What does appear above the line is what the prediction allows: the 532 retrospective tokens — “birth is destroyed,” “there is an escape beyond this” — which by their nature are knowledge arising after emergence.[27]
The apparent counterexamples dissolve on inspection. The canon does contain ‘upekkhakosmī’ti pajānāti — “he knows: ‘I am equanimous'” — which sounds like a label inside deep jhāna, where equanimity reigns. But locate the sentence: it occurs in a discourse on observing the faculties as they arise in ordinary experience, nowhere near an absorption formula.[28] The third jhāna’s own description does contain a quote — ‘upekkhako satimā sukhavihārī’ti, “equanimous, mindful, dwelling happily” — but look at its governing verb: ācikkhanti, “they declare.” It is what the noble ones say about the attainer. Reported speech, not a meditator’s label.[29] One honest edge does remain, and the census flags it rather than explaining it away: the formless attainments beyond the fourth jhāna embed a quote in their own formula — ‘ananto ākāso’ti, “unbounded space” — and thirty-one label-tokens sit in such contexts. A defender will say this quote gives the perception-content of the attainment rather than a discursive label; a skeptic will call it a breach of the boundary; the data are on the table either way.[30]
Then the later manual tradition takes the same law and states it as pedagogy — in so many words. The Visuddhimagga’s instructions for breath-meditation tell the beginner to count the breaths, and the counting is done with quoted number-labels: ‘ekaṃ ekan’ti … ‘dasa dasā’ti, “one, one … ten, ten.” And the text fixes when to stop: count yāva vinā gaṇanāya assāsapassāsārammaṇe sati santiṭṭhati — “until mindfulness stays on the breath-object without counting” — because counting exists satisaṇṭhāpanatthaṃ yeva, “solely for the purpose of establishing mindfulness.”[31] The tradition, in other words, prescribed the label with its expiry written into the prescription.
Nor is any of this a Pāli idiosyncrasy. The same discourses survived in a second transmission line — the Āgamas, translated into Chinese between the second and fifth centuries from the collections of other early schools — and there the doctrine appears as a ladder of progressive silences. The Saṃyukta-āgama: 初禪正受時，言語寂滅；第二禪正受時，覺觀寂滅 — “on attaining the first dhyāna, speech falls silent; on attaining the second dhyāna, thought-and-examination falls silent.”[32] First outer speech goes, then the inner speech from which it comes — the sequence Dhammadinnā taught, spread over the stages of absorption. The Madhyama-āgama adds an image — thought is the thorn (刺) of the second jhāna, the thing that pricks it — and the Pāli Aṅguttara says the same in the same words: dutiyassa jhānassa vitakkavicārā kaṇṭako.[33] Across three transmission lines the architecture is identical: discursive labeling is the coarse, useful, self-limiting instrument of the lower floors.
A modern imposition?
Is the question itself — “does the meditator inwardly say the label?” — a modern imposition, the kind only people who have read too much Mahasi would put to an ancient text? The Kathāvatthu proves otherwise. This book of the Abhidhamma is a record of doctrinal debates between the early Buddhist schools, compiled within a few centuries of the Buddha’s death, and one of its debates — the Vacībhedakathā, “the discussion of the outbreak of speech” — is about our very question.
Some schools — the commentary names the Pubbaseliyas — held a startling doctrine: that for a meditator in first jhāna at the moment of stream-entry, dukkhanti vācā bhijjati — the utterance “suffering!” literally breaks forth. Not a thought: speech. The Theravādin debater refutes them by making the claim say itself plainly: “Dukkhanti jānanto dukkhanti vācaṃ bhāsatī”ti? Āmantā. — “So one who knows ‘suffering’ utters the speech ‘suffering’? — Yes,” the opponent affirms.[34]
The debate is evidence twice over. An early Buddhist school read the label-formula so literally as verbal that it had the meditator audibly speak, and the question had to be settled in formal debate — nobody stages a controversy over a reading no one holds. And both sides take one thing for granted: the Pubbaseliyas place their outbreak of speech only in the first jhāna — where vitakka still operates — and deny it everywhere above. Even the school that made the label audible respected Dhammadinnā’s boundary. The mainstream position, which won, is that the label is vitakka and therefore silent. The position defended in this essay is the mainstream’s.
Scholastic Convergence
The Pāli canon states the equation of thought and inner speech as Dhammadinnā’s doctrine and leaves it there. The Sanskrit scholastics built it into their definitions.
Alongside the Pāli tradition of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, Buddhist India developed great scholastic systems in Sanskrit — the one that matters here is the Yogācāra school of Asaṅga and Vasubandhu, whose treatises systematized the psychology of meditation in the fourth and fifth centuries. When these scholars came to define vitarka (the Sanskrit form of vitakka), here is what they wrote: vitarkaḥ paryeṣako manojalpaḥ — “applied thought is searching mental-talk.” And its partner: vicāraḥ pratyavekṣako manojalpaḥ — “examination is reviewing mental-talk.”[35] The word doing the work is manojalpa: jalpa is talk, chatter, articulate utterance; manojalpa is the mind’s talk. Thought, in the formal definition of the tradition’s own psychologists, is a kind of speaking.
The commentator Sthiramati then unpacks the definition. He gives the etymology — manaso jalpo manojalpaḥ … jalpo ‘rthakathanam, “mind’s talk: the stating of a meaning” — and then illustrates how the two kinds of mental talk actually sound. The searching mind, he says, proceeds kim etad iti — “what is this?” — and the reviewing mind concludes idaṃ tad iti — “it is this.”[36] His examples are quoted phrases, closed with iti. When a sixth-century scholastic wanted to show his readers what applied thought is like from the inside, he reached for the construction this census has been counting. Another commentator, Yaśomitra, calls vitarka the mind’s vāksamutthāpikā avasthā — its “speech-prompting phase,” the state of mind from which utterance springs.[37]
Not every school signed the equation: the older Sarvāstivāda defined vitarka differently — as cittaudārikatā, “grossness of mind,” with no mention of talk — so the explicit speech-equation is a Yogācāra formulation, not a universal one. But even the Sarvāstivāda master-text classifies vitarka-vicāra as vāksaṃskāra, the speech-formation — just as Dhammadinnā does.[38] The disagreement is over how much to say; the underlying classification is shared.
The convergence extends beyond thought to mindfulness itself, and here the two traditions echo each other across the sea. Sthiramati defines smṛti — the Sanskrit for sati, mindfulness — as abhilapanatā: the mind’s repeated re-articulation of its object, a word built on abhi-√lap, a speech root. The Kośa’s discussion of the foundations of mindfulness says the seen is retained yathādṛṣṭasya-abhilapanāt — “through re-speaking it as it was seen.”[39] Now the Pāli side: the Milindapañha, asked for the characteristic of sati, answers apilāpana — and illustrates it with the king’s treasurer, who keeps the royal wealth present to the king by reciting it item by item: so much gold, so much silver, so many elephants. Sati, in the tradition’s own simile, is the faculty that names and lists.[40] Two traditions, two languages, one picture: mindfulness holds its object by wording it.
Finally, the vocabulary of noting itself. We will see below that the Pāli commentators coined a technical verb for the practice — sallakkheti, “to mark, to note.” The Sanskrit tradition, independently, turned the same root technical: the Śrāvakabhūmi, a meditation manual of the Yogācāra corpus, has the practitioner upalakṣayaty upasthitayā smṛtyā — “he notes, with mindfulness present” — and the Kośa’s six-stage breath-method gives upalakṣaṇā, discernment-noting, a stage of its own.[41] The same manual preserves the satipaṭṭhāna self-observation labels verbatim and first-person — asti me … saṃyojanam iti prajānāti, “he knows: ‘there is in me a fetter'” — and governs the sixteen breath-resolves with śikṣate, “he trains” — the Pāli sikkhati in Sanskrit dress.[42] Whatever else one concludes, the label-formulas were not a Pāli eccentricity. They were pan-Buddhist equipment, and the theorists of two traditions, asked what the labels are made of, answered: the mind’s talk.
The Similes
Definitions tell us what the scholastics thought; similes tell us what they saw. And the images the tradition chose for vitakka and vicāra are strikingly consistent.
In the Milindapañha, the dialogue in which the monk Nāgasena answers the questions of a Greek king, Nāgasena is asked to characterize the pair. He says vitakka has the mark of appanā — fixing, driving in — like a carpenter driving a prepared piece of wood into its joint. And vicāra? Anumajjana, sustained stroking. Then he binds the two in a single image: “As when a bronze vessel is struck — the striking is vitakka; the ringing-on is vicāra.”[43] The Visuddhimagga inherits and multiplies the set: the bell-strike and its resonance; the bird’s wingbeat and its glide; the bee’s dive toward the lotus and its circling above it; the hand that grips the tarnished dish and the hand that rubs it clean; the compass-pin that stands fixed at the center and the pin that revolves around it.[44] Behind them all stands the fixed commentarial definition: abhiniropana-lakkhaṇo vitakko — vitakka’s characteristic is the planting of the mind upon its object.[45]
Strike, plant, fix, drive. Every image renders vitakka a punctual act — a single, brief placement — and vicāra the continuation that the placement opens up. For a meditator who has used a label, the description is familiar: the note is short; it touches the object once; and in its wake comes a stretch of quiet observation that the note opened. The note strikes; the observing resonates. The tradition’s similes for thought-in-meditation double as a phenomenology of noting.
The canon even supplies the negative image — what the wrong kind of inner repetition looks like. A discourse on the thoroughbred contrasts it with the nag at the feeding-trough, who stands there brooding ‘yavasaṃ yavasan’ti — “fodder, fodder!”[46] The obsessive inner refrain is portrayed in the very syntax of the repeating label. The authors of these texts clearly knew that minds repeat quoted words to themselves — the same habit they mock in the greedy horse, they harness in the meditator.
Buddha taught listeners, not readers…
We read these texts; their first audiences heard them. A sutta was a performance: composed for the voice, carried by reciters, received by ear. And a quoted first-person formula behaves differently in the ear than on the page. When the reciter says ‘dīghaṃ assasāmī’ti pajānāti, every hearer’s inner voice pronounces assasāmi — “I breathe in” — in the only person available to an inner voice: their own. The recitation does not describe the practice; it rehearses it in the listener. Heard correctly, the sutta is very nearly self-installing — the hearer is handed the inner voice of the practice ready-made, and hearing the instruction and beginning to execute it are almost the same event. A that-clause translation kills this twice over: silent reading removes the voice, and third-person content removes the person. What remains is a report about a meditator, where the original put the meditator’s words in your mouth.
The oldest strata show this economy working at full speed. The Pārāyanavagga of the Suttanipāta — poetry the tradition itself ranks among its most ancient — records sixteen brahmin students putting their questions to the Buddha, each exchange only a few verses long. One of them, Upasīva, asks for what any meditation student asks a teacher for: ārammaṇaṃ brūhi samantacakkhu — “tell me the object, All-seeing One, relying on which I might cross this flood.” The whole answer is two lines, and at its center sits a quoted label: ākiñcaññaṃ pekkhamāno satimā, ‘natthī’ti nissāya tarassu oghaṃ — “contemplating nothingness, mindful, relying on ‘there is not,’ cross the flood.”[47] Asked for an object, the Buddha hands him a two-syllable thought. The canonical commentary on this collection, the Niddesa, already reads the line as we would: relying on ‘there is not’ means the attainment of nothingness, entered by its formula, natthi kiñcī’ti.
Upasīva does not ask “but how does one rely on a phrase?” His follow-up questions concern remaining in the attainment, and the fate of the liberated one’s consciousness afterward — the questions of a man already inside the practice, asking about its far end. He took the label and went.
The tradition even has a technical name for hearers of this caliber. The Puggalapaññatti’s four-fold typology of students begins with the ugghaṭitaññū, defined as one whose “penetration of the Dhamma occurs at the very moment of utterance” — saha udāhaṭavelāya dhammābhisamayo.[48] At the moment of utterance: the definition itself assumes that hearing the words rightly and realizing them can be one event — which is what a self-installing formula makes possible. And the same typology descends through hearers who need elaboration to the neyya, the one who must be guided step by step. Read in this light, the later tradition’s expansions — the counting methods, the chosen names, the graded manuals — are not a different teaching. They are the same labels, re-tooled for the neyya. The pipeline from canonical formula to practice manual, which Part IV will document, is one pedagogy adjusting itself to declining ears.
Part III: The Case Against iti as meditation instruction
The first objection is the grammar, already conceded in Part I: because iti is the only clausal complement a knowing-verb can take, no individual sentence — not one, in the whole canon — can prove the labeling reading. Whoever argues this thesis by waving a favorite proof-text argues it badly. The case rests wholly on distribution: on the closed lexicon, the preserved person, the placement of the formulas. The thesis must be argued from patterns, never from proof-texts. The old minimal-pair argument from 2008 — “had the Buddha meant as impermanent, he would have said aniccato” — also needs a qualification the census forced on us: the aniccato construction does occur with the same verbs, 127 times against the quotative’s 75 for the same predicates. The 127 cluster heavily in one litany family (aniccato dukkhato rogato gaṇḍato… — “as impermanent, as painful, as a disease, as a boil…”), so the two constructions differ somewhat in their habitat; still, the canon demonstrably had both and used both, and the minimal pair survives only as a tendency.[49]
The second objection: the same grammatical frame carries content that no one could possibly note. The canon writes ‘kāyassa bhedā … sītībhavissantī’ti pajānāti — “he knows: ‘with the body’s breakup, all that is felt will grow cold'” — a future-tense quote, unperformable as a label; and it runs entire doctrinal expositions through the same ‘ti pajānāti frame.[50] The frame does double duty, and so the practice-use can never be identified by the frame alone. It must be identified by shape — brevity, fixity, first person, context — every time. The census works this way throughout, which is why its classes matter more than its total (unless longer statements were contemplations as well – less noting, more a form of contemplation).
The third objection is the most serious, because it comes from the earliest readers we have. When the Āgama collections were translated into Chinese between the second and fifth centuries, the translators had to make our choice — and they made it against the quote. The Madhyama-āgama’s signature rendering is 行則知行: “walking, then he knows walking”; the breath formula becomes 入息長即知入息長, “breathing in long, he knows the long in-breath.” The Indic first person has been dissolved into an object.[51] And this cannot be dismissed as a limitation of Chinese, because the same translators had quotative machinery ready to hand — 作是念, “he forms this thought: …,” appears over six hundred times in one collection — and chose not to use it for the meditation formulas.[52] The earliest external witnesses, in other words, read the formula as plain knowing. Under a vocalization version of the thesis, this would be close to decisive. Under the vitakka version its force narrows: if the label is a thought with content, then “knows X” is a defensible rendering, and what the translators actually flattened is the person — “I” became “it.” And one collection resisted even that: the Ekottarika-āgama writes 觀知我今息長 — “he observes and knows: ‘my breath is now long'” — and 自覺知我得樂痛, “he himself knows: ‘I feel a pleasant feeling’.”[53] One Āgama heard the first person and kept it. As an objection it has shrunk to a caution.
The fourth objection comes from inside the Pāli tradition itself: the commentators demote the bare label. Commenting on ‘gacchāmī’ti pajānāti, the aṭṭhakathā raises the hard question itself: even dogs and jackals, when walking, know they are walking — kāmaṃ soṇasiṅgālādayopi gacchantā ‘gacchāmā’ti jānanti. Such knowing, it says, “does not abandon the perception of a being, does not remove the conceit of self, is neither a meditation subject nor satipaṭṭhāna-development.”[54] For the commentator, the sutta’s pajānāti must mean something more than registering “going”: it means the analysis that discovers no walker behind the walking. On the way to this point, though, the commentator concedes the label’s arising as a plain psychological fact: ‘gacchāmī’ti cittaṃ uppajjati, “the thought ‘I am going’ arises,” and from it the bodily process unfolds.[55] The quote is the content of a mental event; his quarrel is only with anyone who would stop there. Taken as a warning, the passage stands against every mechanical use of noting. Taken as an objection to the vitakka thesis, it has no force at all — for that thesis claims exactly what the commentator grants: the label arises as a thought, and the practice is what knowing does with it.
Finally, the refutation conditions. If the label-lexicon were open-ended and clause-like, the structural argument would collapse — it is not. If label-formulas ran on inside the second jhāna and above, the vitakka mechanism would be broken — they do not. If the traditions had defined vitakka in ways unconnected to speech, the mechanism would be our modern imposition — they defined it as mental talk. The construction passes the tests that could have killed it, which in philology is as much as any thesis can show.
Part IV: Stratigraphy — From Formula to Method
How did the canonical formulas become the modern noting retreat? The census can answer, because its verbs are datable. The canon, the commentaries (aṭṭhakathā, compiled in Sri Lanka around the fifth century), and the subcommentaries form strata, like geology; a verb’s distribution across them is its history.
Pajānāti, “he knows,” owns the canonical formula: 1,666 tokens in the canon. Then it goes quiet. The commentaries do not compose new ‘X’ti pajānāti sentences of their own; they inherit the old ones and explain them. The formula, by the commentarial age, is scripture — received, no longer productive.
A different verb moves in the opposite direction. Sallakkheti, “to mark, to note” — the verb the Burmese teachers would one day use for noting — occurs in our construction eight times at the canonical level, every one of them in the Visuddhimagga (itself a fifth-century manual), and not once in the four great Nikāyas. In the commentarial layer it explodes: a hundred and fifteen quotative tokens, and nearly six hundred occurrences of its gerund sallakkhetvā, “having noted.”[56] The subcommentary states the mature doctrine without embarrassment: yo pana aniccaṃ dukkhamanattāti tīṇi lakkhaṇāni sallakkheti — “one who notes the three characteristics” under their quoted names, “impermanent, painful, not-self.”[57] Where the canon said know: “impermanent”, the commentators said: he notes it. They read their founder’s formula, and they named what they saw in it.
The Visuddhimagga goes a step further and treats the beginner’s label as, straightforwardly, a name to be uttered. Instructing the earth-kasiṇa, it tells the meditator to choose among the names of earth — yamicchati … taṃ vattabbaṃ, “whichever he wishes, that should be said” — and then to develop ‘pathavī pathavī’ti, “earth, earth”; the subcommentaries add the natural progression, manasā eva punappunaṃ, “then with the mind alone, again and again.”[58] Spoken first, interiorized after, retired at depth: the full life-cycle of a label, prescribed in a fifth-century text. The translation record shows one telling exception here: this kasiṇa instruction is the one place where translators have kept the label literal all along — everyone renders “earth, earth” — because here the practice was too obvious to dissolve into a that-clause. Where the translators could see the meditation, they kept the quotation marks.
So the pipeline is documented at every joint. The canon supplies formulas whose shape — short, fixed, first-person, known — is the shape of noting. The commentarial stratum attaches to those very formulas a technical vocabulary of marking (sallakkhaṇā, vavatthāna) and an explicit pedagogy of labels chosen, spoken, interiorized, and retired. And the modern Burmese teachers took their verb — Mahasi’s sallakkheti — straight from that stratum, and their exercises from those slots. Whether the Buddha “taught noting” in the strong sense, no census can establish; intentions do not fossilize. What the corpus attests in detail is something almost as good: that noting is the tradition’s own reading of its founder’s formulas, worked out independently by its scholastics on both sides of the transmission — sallakkhaṇā in Pāli, upalakṣaṇā and manojalpa in Sanskrit. The Mahasi method is not an invention wanting for pedigree. It is the current form of the longest-running interpretation the formula has.
Part V: What This Means for the Meditator
For Buddhist studies, the census offers a construction: countable, classifiable, and consequential. For the practitioner, it offers something more personal — the discovery that the strangest-looking feature of one’s technique is the oldest.
First: the noting meditator practices inside the canon, not beside it. Anyone who has sat a noting retreat knows the faint embarrassment — the suspicion that the little words, “rising,” “falling,” “hearing,” “wandering,” are a modern crutch, training wheels bolted onto an ancient bicycle. The census says otherwise. The meditator who notes is filling the very slots the texts fill — ‘gacchāmī’ti, ‘sarāgaṃ cittan’ti, ‘atthi me ajjhattaṃ kāmacchando’ti — with the very kind of content the texts prescribe: brief, present-tense, first-person. And the standard objection — that noting interposes thinking between the meditator and the moment — has the psychology backwards on the canon’s own account. Thinking was never absent; the untrained mind talks constantly. The note is not added thinking but harnessed thinking: vitakka given one word of rope. Dhammadinnā’s doctrine dignifies the technique at a stroke — since thought is inner speech anyway, the label simply takes the speech the mind was going to make regardless, and makes it serve attention.
Second: the label is an instrument, and the tradition’s own warning against fetishizing it should be posted in every meditation hall. The commentator’s dogs and jackals return here: walking, they know they are walking. A note that merely tags experience — “walking… walking…” — while leaving intact the one who walks, has added nothing the jackal lacks. The label exists to open a seeing-through: who walks? what is this “going” made of, moment to moment? To stabilize concentration, to evoke a jhanic “flow state” on a particular topic. The commentary and the Mahasi teachers say the same thing here, as heirs usually do. And the satipaṭṭhāna refrain had already said it most compactly: the label is for the sake of ñāṇamattāya, “a mere measure of knowing.” That little -matta is a leash on the label as much as a license for it.
Third: the label is designed to die. Every stratum of the tradition agrees: Dhammadinnā’s doctrine (thought is the speech-formation, and the speech-formation ceases in the second jhāna); the counting rule (count until mindfulness stays without counting); the thorn-simile (thought is the thorn of the second jhāna); the Chinese ladder of silences (first speech falls silent, then inner speech). The labeling function extinguishes itself as concentration deepens — and every one of these texts treats that extinction as success. A noting practice that can never fall silent has stalled: if the note still fires at every moment after years on the cushion, a device meant to retire has become the practice itself. And a concentration practice that despises the label has forgotten what brought it to the door: the silence it prizes is, by the tradition’s own account, the label’s successful completion, not its refutation. The counting doctrine’s “until no longer needed” is perhaps the most humane piece of practice engineering the manuals contain, and it generalizes cleanly: note until noting is no longer needed; then let the silence do the noting.
Fourth: the formula is the Dhamma’s verifiability made concrete. Buddhism’s proudest epithet for its teaching is sandiṭṭhika — “directly visible,” checkable by anyone, not a matter of faith or time. That claim can sound like advertising until one asks where the canon hides it. The answer is our construction, handed to a skeptical brahmin in the second person: is there defilement of mind in you now? then you can know: ‘atthi me ajjhattaṃ…’ — “there is in me…” A living Buddhism that wants to meet the modern demand for testability has, in this construction, its oldest asset: a canon whose central formulas are observation protocols: first person, present tense, one line long, waiting to be run. And the translator can serve that Buddhism at almost no cost: keep the quotation marks. Let the English reader see what the Pāli hearer heard — that at the heart of these texts, someone is being told what to know, and in which word to know it.
Conclusion
A census alone cannot tell us what the redactors intended. A canon saturated with short, fixed, first-person quotations lodged in the object-slot of verbs of knowing. A refrain that calls the bare label, held to a mere measure, established mindfulness. A psychology that defines thought as unspoken speech, and on that basis predicts — correctly, in three separate textual traditions — where the labels must fall silent. A scholasticism, Pāli and Sanskrit alike, that theorized the mechanism as mental talk and coined technical noting-verbs to name the practice. And a modern method whose vocabulary descends from that scholasticism by ordinary filiation, one verb handed down the centuries.
Against this stand the real concessions, none of which this essay has tried to shrink: grammar proves nothing locally; the frame has other uses; most ancient translators heard knowing rather than noting. The judgment defended here is that the concessions bound the claim without breaking it. The canonical formulas encode the drill. The manuals supply the theory of the drill. The noting traditions of the present practice both.
What the editor of this blog saw in 2008 — an instruction staring out of a formula that translation had smoothed into description — was there to be seen, and is still there: seven thousand three hundred and eighty-four times. Less often in English translations…
A Note on Method and Data
All counts derive from a five-stage extraction and classification pipeline over the Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana Tipiṭaka (Roman script, 217 XML files: mūla, aṭṭhakathā, ṭīkā, and para-canonical works), with parallel sweeps of the GRETIL Sanskrit corpus (784 TEI files) and CBETA editions of T 26, T 99, T 125, T 602, T 606, and T 607. Classification criteria are published as executable code; residual ambiguity (670 canonical tokens) is reported as a class, not resolved silently; a random spot-check of 36 classified tokens found one disputable assignment. The full token tables, distribution analyses, gloss surveys, Sanskrit and Chinese cross-check reports, and scripts are available as a data supplement. Citations below give CST file and paragraph, Taishō volume and line, or GRETIL file, as appropriate; every locus was machine-verified in the corpora.
Bibliography
Primary sources (digital editions used)
- Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana Tipiṭaka, Roman script (Vipassana Research Institute XML). Canonical: Dīgha-, Majjhima-, Saṃyutta-, Aṅguttara-nikāya; Khuddaka (Suttanipāta, Paṭisambhidāmagga, Mahāniddesa, Milindapañha, Peṭakopadesa, Nettippakaraṇa); Vibhaṅga; Kathāvatthu. Commentarial: Sumaṅgalavilāsinī, Papañcasūdanī, Atthasālinī, and associated ṭīkās. Para-canonical: Visuddhimagga with Mahāṭīkā.
- GRETIL: Göttingen Register of Electronic Texts in Indian Languages, TEI corpus (2021 snapshot): Śrāvakabhūmi, Abhidharmakośabhāṣya with Vyākhyā, Abhidharmasamuccaya and Bhāṣya, Pañcaskandhaka with Sthiramati’s Vaibhāṣya, Triṃśikā-bhāṣya, Prajñāpāramitā corpus, Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya materials.
- CBETA XML P5: Madhyamāgama (T 26), Saṃyuktāgama (T 99), Ekottarikāgama (T 125), Da anban shouyi jing (T 602), Xiuxing daodi jing (T 606), Daodi jing (T 607).
Grammars and reference works
- Warder, A. K. Introduction to Pali. 3rd ed. Oxford: Pali Text Society, 1991.
- Duroiselle, Charles. A Practical Grammar of the Pāli Language. Rangoon, 1906 (repr.).
- Wijesekera, O. H. de A. Syntax of the Cases in the Pāli Nikāyas. Colombo: Postgraduate Institute of Pali and Buddhist Studies, 1993.
- Perniola, Vito. Pali Grammar. Oxford: Pali Text Society, 1997.
- Fahs, Achim. Grammatik des Pali. 2nd ed. Leipzig: Verlag Enzyklopädie, 1989.
- Rhys Davids, T. W., and W. Stede. Pali–English Dictionary. London: Pali Text Society, 1921–25. S.v. iti.
Prior statements of the thesis
- Theravadin (ed.), “iti and sallakkheti,” theravadin.org, 28 March 2008.
- Theravadin (ed.), “Labels employed for noting in early Pitaka,” theravadin.org, 8 April 2009.
Data supplement
- The …’ti Census: token tables (7,384 rows), classification scripts, analysis tables, commentarial gloss survey, Sanskrit parallel tables and deep-dive report, Chinese cross-check report, label lexicon. (Repository accompanying this article.)
Notes
[1] Peṭakopadesa §23 (CST s0520m). The canonical Samādhi suttas deploy the same construction with yathābhūtaṃ intervening: “Samādhiṃ, bhikkhave, bhāvetha. Samāhito, bhikkhave, bhikkhu yathābhūtaṃ pajānāti. Kiñca yathābhūtaṃ pajānāti? ‘Cakkhu anicca’nti yathābhūtaṃ pajānāti…” (SN 35.99, CST s0304m §99); with the four truths as content at SN 56.1 (s0305m §1071). The Peṭakopadesa sentence is the formula’s tersest attested form and, as it happens, the sentence with which the 2008 essay opened.
[2] “iti and sallakkheti,” theravadin.org, 2008-03-28; the label-catalogue follows in “Labels employed for noting in early Pitaka,” 2009-04-08.
[3] Corpus: 217 CST Roman-script XML files. Extraction verbs and passes, classification rules, and all tables: data supplement, scripts/ and census-data/. Token total: 7,384; canonical (mūla) share: 2,702.
[4] Register control: the narrative thought-frame etadahosi – ‘…’ti occurs 1,003 times in the mūla files (e.g. Vin I, Sudinna’s ‘yaṃnūnāhampi dhammaṃ suṇeyyan’ti; DN 1’s cosmogonic Brahmā, s0101m); Vinaya case-law knowing: “Jānāti nāma: sāmaṃ vā jānāti, aññe vā tassa ārocenti…” (vin01m) and status-knowledge such as ‘anukkhitto’ti jānāti (vin02m1 §427). In none of these mundane contexts does a yaṃ-clause complement a cognition verb. The standard grammars state the rule in these terms. Warder, Introduction to Pali (3rd ed., PTS 1991), 36: “The indeclinable ti means ‘end quote’ and stands at the end of any passage in direct speech. It is used also to mark something thought”; and: “Indirect speech is exceedingly rare in Pali, so that instead of such English constructions as ‘he said (or thought) that so and so’ … we find direct speech with ti” — “exceedingly rare,” not absent, as the corpus shows. Duroiselle, Practical Grammar of the Pali Language, §624: the oblique construction is expressed “by placing the particle iti … after the words in the direct construction,” with verbs “of saying, telling, asking, naming, knowing, thinking.” Wijesekera, Syntax of the Cases in the Pāli Nikāyas, §21, classifies the nominative + iti with verbs of speaking, thinking, and knowing as predicative — his example is the census’s E2 formula vimuttasmiṃ vimuttaṃ iti ñāṇaṃ hoti (M I 500). See further the standard treatments of Perniola (PTS 1997, syntax chapters) and Fahs, Grammatik des Pali (Leipzig 1989). Corpus data for the restriction: ṭhānaṃ … vijjati yaṃ 16 canonical tokens; anavakāso yaṃ 109; yatra hi nāma 68; yaṃ-clauses under jānāti/passati: none (the surface matches are free relatives); manner-correlative tathā … (ā)jānāti/pajānāti yathā: ~55, dominated by two formulas (MN 22, s0201m; AN, s0404m3). The wrapped example: MN 115 and Vibhaṅga (abh02m): ‘aṭṭhānametaṃ anavakāso yaṃ diṭṭhisampanno puggalo kañci saṅkhāraṃ niccato upagaccheyyā’ti pajānāti. On iti see also PED s.v.: deictic particle marking off a statement “as the definite contents of (one’s own or other’s) thoughts,” “on the whole untranslatable (unless written as quotation marks).”
[5] DN 22 (CST s0102m §374) = MN 10 (s0201m §107); also MN 62, MN 118 (s0203m), SN 54 passim (s0305m), Vin pārājikā (vin01m).
[6] PED s.v. iti, quoted at length in the 2008 essay.
[7] SN 48.40, Uppaṭipāṭika (CST s0305m): so sukhindriyañca pajānāti, sukhindriyasamudayañca pajānāti… beside ‘sukhitosmī’ti pajānāti in the same discourse.
[8] DN 22 (s0102m, saccapabba) = MN 141: katamā ca, bhikkhave, sammādiṭṭhi? Yaṃ kho… dukkhe ñāṇaṃ, dukkhasamudaye ñāṇaṃ… — 18 canonical tokens of the nominal-content pattern.
[9] MN 123, Acchariya-abbhuta (s0203m §208), of the Tathāgata: viditā vedanā uppajjanti, viditā upaṭṭhahanti, viditā abbhatthaṃ gacchanti — likewise saññā and vitakkā; as a trainable samādhi-development at AN 4.41 (s0402m3). 15 canonical occurrences.
[10] Class table: data supplement, FINDINGS §3 and analysis-tables.md §1. Classes: L1 first-person label 843; L2-instr 367; L2-amb 670; E1 sati-refrain 20; E2 review 532; P-clause 63; P-long 192; unrecoverable 15.
[11] The exegetical idiom ‘…’ti daṭṭhabbaṃ / veditabbaṃ: 0 canonical vs 3,059 commentarial-and-later tokens.
[12] E.g. the ṭhānāṭṭhāna knowledges of MN 115, quotes of paragraph length under pajānāti; future-tense content at n. 50 below.
[13] Contrast the narrative control group (n. 4): in a strictly-delimited sample of 401 etadahosi quotes, 295 distinct forms (73 percent unique), the commonest recurring only with retold pericopes (15× at most). Practice slots: 581 distinct normalized quotes fill the canonical label-slots; frequency table in the data supplement (analysis-tables.md §3); the families with full references in LABEL-LEXICON.md.
[14] First tetrad known: ‘dīghaṃ assasāmī’ti pajānāti (19 canonical tokens), ‘rassaṃ…’ (15); members 3–16 trained: ‘sabbakāyapaṭisaṃvedī assasissāmī’ti sikkhati etc.; 321 canonical sikkhati-tokens in all. Loci as n. 5.
[15] DN 22 (s0102m §375), MN 10 (s0201m §108), MN 119; with ‘ṭhitomhi’, ‘nisinnomhi’, ‘sayānomhi’.
[16] DN 22 (s0102m §380); Vibhaṅga Vedanānupassanāniddesa (abh02m §363); the sāmisa/nirāmisa pairs ibid.; the Dhātuvibhaṅga extension ‘kāyapariyantikaṃ vedanaṃ vedayāmī’ti pajānāti at MN 140 (s0203m §§363–364).
[17] Cittānupassanā: DN 22 (s0102m §381), MN 10, Vibhaṅga Cittānupassanāniddesa (abh02m; the Vibhaṅga inserts me: ‘sarāgaṃ me cittan’ti). Telepathy reuse: the sāmaññaphala sequence (s0101m) and Vism Cetopariyañāṇakathā (e0102n) apply the identical sixteen labels to another’s mind.
[18] DN 22 / MN 10, nīvaraṇa and bojjhaṅga sections; 97 canonical tokens of the atthi me / natthi me frame.
[19] Type-loci: SN 22.51 (s0303m); SN 35.99 (s0304m §99); the nibbānasappāya suttas (s0304m §§147–149); MN 28 extends the set to contact (s0201m).
[20] MN 22 (s0201m §241) and passim: 126 canonical tokens with samanupassati / daṭṭhabbaṃ / pajānāti, plus the wrong-view mirror ‘etaṃ mama…’ti samanupassati (37).
[21] MN 121 (s0203m §§177–180), with the graded ‘suññamidaṃ saññāgataṃ…’ti pajānāti ladder and the closing insight ‘yaṃ kho pana kiñci abhisaṅkhataṃ abhisañcetayitaṃ tadaniccaṃ nirodhadhamman’ti pajānāti (§183).
[22] AN 6.47–48 (s0403m2): sandiṭṭhika defined through the self-check label, second person.
[23] DN 22 / MN 10, closing refrain of each exercise; 20 canonical tokens across the four anupassanās (‘atthi kāyo’ti, ‘atthi vedanā’ti, ‘atthi cittan’ti, ‘atthi dhammā’ti).
[24] Count: 880 matches of the frame Kathañca…? (regex over the
plain text of all CST mūla files; script in the data supplement).
Type-example: DN 22 (s0102m §374): “Kathañca, bhikkhave, bhikkhu kāye kāyānupassī viharati?” — answered by the ānāpāna and posture formulas
of nn. 5 and 12.
[25] MN 44, Cūḷavedalla (s0201m §463 region).
[26] SN 41.6, Kāmabhū (s0304m).
[27] ‘Khīṇā jāti…’ passim; ‘atthi uttari nissaraṇan’ti pajānāti per attainment at MN 111, Anupada (s0203m §94).
[28] SN 48.39–40, Kaṭṭhopama (s0305m): on the arising of each faculty, ‘upekkhakosmī’ti / ‘sukhitosmī’ti / ‘dukkhitosmī’ti pajānāti.
[29] Third-jhāna pericope, passim: yaṃ taṃ ariyā ācikkhanti ‘upekkhako satimā sukhavihārī’ti.
[30] ‘Ananto ākāso’ti ākāsānañcāyatanaṃ upasampajja viharati; Vism arūpa parikamma ‘ākāso ākāso’ti … manasikātabbaṃ (e0101n, Paṭhamāruppa). 31 canonical label-tokens in formless-attainment contexts; discussion in FINDINGS §6.
[31] Vism VIII (e0101n §§223–224): ‘ekaṃ ekan’ti ādiṃ katvā yāva ‘dasa dasā’ti … gaṇetabbaṃ; the slow herdsman’s and the swift cowherd’s counting; terminus and purpose as quoted.
[32] SĀ, T 2, 99 at lb 0121b03.
[33] MĀ, T 1, 26 at lb 0561a08 (以覺觀為刺); AN 10.72, Kaṇṭaka (s0404m3 §72).
[34] Kv, Vacībhedakathā (abh03m3 §§326–327); attribution: Kv-a (abh03a): yesaṃ “sotāpattimaggakkhaṇe paṭhamaṃ jhānaṃ samāpannassa dukkhanti vācā bhijjatī”ti laddhi, seyyathāpi etarahi pubbaseliyādīnaṃ — “those whose doctrine is that at the moment of the stream-entry path, for one attained to the first jhāna, the utterance ‘dukkha’ breaks forth — as nowadays the Pubbaseliyas and others.”
[35] Abhidharmasamuccaya and Vasubandhu’s Pañcaskandhaka, s.vv. vitarka/vicāra (GRETIL files; verbatim passages in the data supplement’s Sanskrit deep-dive report).
[36] Sthiramati, Pañcaskandhaka-vaibhāṣā ad loc.
[37] Yaśomitra, Abhidharmakośa-vyākhyā ad AK ii.
[38] AKBh ad ii.33 region: vitarka as cittaudārikatā; vitarka-vicāra classed under vāksaṃskāra in the saṃskāra discussion — the Kośa’s echo of M i 301.
[39] Sthiramati, Triṃśikā-bhāṣya s.v. smṛti: abhilapanatā; AKBh smṛtyupasthāna discussion: yathādṛṣṭasyābhilapanāt, with Yaśomitra: abhilapyate smṛtyā udgṛhyate.
[40] Mil 2.1.13 (quoted with the treasurer simile in the Atthasālinī, abh01a): apilāpanalakkhaṇā sati; the treasurer sallakkhāpeti sāreti — “makes [the king] note, reminds him.”
[41] Śrāvakabhūmi: upalakṣayaty upasthitayā smṛtyā; AKBh vi, ānāpāna in six stages with upalakṣaṇā.
[42] Śrāvakabhūmi, satipaṭṭhāna section: asti me … saṃyojanam iti prajānāti etc.; the sixteen aspects with śikṣate (ti śikṣate, 43 occurrences in the Śbh files).
[43] Mil (s0518m §§13–14): vitakka appanālakkhaṇa with the carpenter; vicāra anumajjanalakkhaṇa with the struck bronze vessel (ākoṭanā / anuravanā).
[44] Vism IV (e0101n §71): the full set as listed.
[45] Atthasālinī (abh01a) and the fixed formula across some fifteen commentarial files: abhiniropanalakkhaṇo vitakko.
[46] AN 11.9, Sandha (s0404m4): na ‘yavasaṃ yavasan’ti jhāyati.
[47] Sn 1076, Upasīvamāṇavapucchā (s0505m); repeated with canonical
exegesis at Cūḷaniddesa 39–40 (s0516m), which glosses: natthīti nissāya tarassu oghan’ti: natthi kiñcī’ti ākiñcaññāyatanasamāpatti — and
construes the label-formula as the means of entry.
[48] Puggalapaññatti §148 (abh03m2): “Katamo ca puggalo ugghaṭitaññū? Yassa puggalassa saha udāhaṭavelāya dhammābhisamayo hoti — ayaṃ vuccati puggalo ‘ugghaṭitaññū’.” The four-hearer typology
(ugghaṭitaññū, vipañcitaññū, neyya, padaparama) is redeployed at
Nettippakaraṇa 9 (s0519m).
[49] Counts: 127 ablative-construction tokens (12 files) vs 75 quotative tokens for the anicca-family predicates with the same verbs; e.g. SN 35.53 cakkhuṃ aniccato jānato passato avijjā pahīyati (s0304m) beside SN 35.99’s quotative (n. 1).
[50] SN 12.51 and parallels (s0302m, s0303m): 7 canonical tokens.
[51] MĀ, T 1, 26: postures at lb 0582b20; breath at lb 0582c14; feelings at lb 0583c24. SĀ (T 2, 99): 覺知 and 善學 (for sikkhati) at lb 0206a28.
[52] 作是念: 630 occurrences in T 26; 念言: 25 in T 99 — freely used for narrative deliberation, never for the sensation-monitoring formulas. Full survey in the data supplement’s Chinese cross-check report.
[53] EĀ, T 2, 125: breath at lb 0556b01; feelings at lb 0568b28. The same collection flattens elsewhere (lb 0582a15), so the preservation is a trace, not a policy.
[54] Sv on DN 22 (s0102a §375) = Ps on MN 10 (s0201a §108).
[55] Ibid.: “‘gacchāmī’ti cittaṃ uppajjati, taṃ vāyaṃ janeti, vāyo viññattiṃ janeti…”
[56] Verb table: data supplement, FINDINGS §5. Sallakkheti quotative tokens: canon 8 (all Visuddhimagga: asubha-nimitta marking, ‘kālakato’ti, ‘mayhaṃ goṇā’ti), aṭṭhakathā 115; sallakkhetvā 594 across the commentarial corpus; vavatthapeti/vavatthapetvā 274.
[57] Mūlaṭīkā on the Dhammasaṅgaṇī commentary (abh01t).
[58] Vism IV (e0101n §§55–57): pathavīnāmesu yamicchati, yadassa saññānukūlaṃ hoti, taṃ vattabbaṃ. … pākaṭavaseneva pathavī pathavīti bhāvetabbaṃ; the mental-only continuation in the ṭīkā verse tradition (abh06t): karoto manasā eva punappunañca yogino.
