Комм. Нянамоли тхеры:
The Pali word tasati can mean either 'to thirst' or 'to tremble with fear'. The alternative alignments satanha and sabhaya might seem to indicate the commentator's awareness of the two Sanskrit words trsyati (to thirst, cf. Skr. trsnä and Pali tanhä) and trasati (to tremble, cf. Skr. uiträsa and Pali uttaasa); but the Pali tanhä almost never means literally 'thirst'. Äcariya Buddhaghosa's exegesis, however, excluded on principle any recourse to Sanskrit as the basic prakrit, since the whole of his exegctical system is designed to reinstate Pali for Theravada Buddhists as the 'root-language' (müla-bhäsä: see Vis. Ch. xiv, § 25/p. 441 and VbhA. 387-8), though there is free borrowing of Sanskrit 'loan words '. Sanskrit had to be displaced from the position from where it was perhaps threatening, as the Sarvästivädin and Mahäyänist medium, to swamp Pali in the 5th century in Ceylon and S. India.
In his exegesis he sometimes makes use indirectly of Sanskrit sources as a supporting argument in grammatical discussions and the like (not referred to openly, but usually as 'what is said in the world (loke)') but he never concedes it any basic authority. This fact has to be taken into consideration before it can be established that his knowledge of Sanskrit was faulty on the basis of, say, his explanation of
dosinaa at MA. ii. 250 in which he makes no mention of the Sanskrit jyotsnä,deriving it instead from the Pali dosäpagatä. Given the
'root-language' policy, clearly stated, how could the word be made a derivative of the Sanskrit jyotsnä (one Pali equivalent of which is
ju.nhaa)? We may ask even today how far a claim that all the prakrits are derived from Sanskrit is sound or justified (see Childers' Dict. Intro.) and if it is so at all.