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piṇḍapāto

piṇḍapāta

masc nom sg of piṇḍapāta (noun)

1. alms food; lit. lump dropping

Built from

• piṇḍa — stem · lump, ball
  A noun meaning a rounded mass of rice or food. Likely from a non-Indo-European source, but naturalized in Pali with the standard masculine stem-form.
• pāta — root · falling, drop
  From √pat (to fall, fly, descend). The sense moves from the concrete image of something dropping downward to the event of alms descending into the monk's bowl. Cognate with Latin patēre (to open, spread).

Analysis. piṇḍa (lump of rice) + pāta (falling, dropping); the compound refers to the practice of monks receiving alms as lumps of food placed in their bowls, a central feature of Buddhist mendicancy.

Etymology. piṇḍa is probably from an Austroasiatic substrate (cf. Sanskrit piṇḍa, possibly borrowed), denoting a rounded mass or ball; pāta is from √pat (to fall, fly), cognate with Latin patēre (to lie open, spread), showing the basic spatial sense 'downward motion' applied to the falling of alms into the bowl.

Meanings from the Digital Pāḷi Dictionary; morphology and etymology by Claude.

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