Понятие "существо": сатта-паннатти и авидджамана-паннатти.

Victor H. Mair - Professor of Chinese Language and Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania - пишет в 2017 году:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=31294#comment-1528359
Victor Mair said, March 2, 2017 @ 8:41 am From Jan Nattier:

The consensus among specialists, as far as I am aware, is that the Buddha probably spoke something called "Old Māgadhī" (one of many Prakrit/Middle Indic vernaculars spoken on the subcontinent at his time). Nothing was recorded in writing (or even passed down in memorized form, so far as we know) in this language, though some scholars have pointed to individual lexical items in a few Buddhist texts as likely to be "Magadhisms" (like the bits of Aramaic in the Greek New Testament I suppose).

Pāli was one of a number of languages in which Buddhist sacred texts were memorized and transmitted, the oddity here being that no one ever spoke Pāli as his or her native language; Jonathan is right, it is an "artificial Prakrit" (there is a classic article by von Hinüber on this, I'm sure I can dig up the reference if you don't find it easily), deliberately put together from more than one Prakrit (= vernacular) to serve as the language of sacred texts in one particular ordination lineage (the one that developed into the so-called Theravāda lineages of today).

Many other "Buddhist languages" (that is, languages used by various ordination lineages to transmit sacred texts) certainly existed, though we have little or no evidence of them. And as far as written textual remains go, Gāndhārī stands out as having by far the earliest surviving Buddhist manuscripts (as old as the 1st c. BCE).

So there is actually a quite clearcut answer to the question you asked: the winner is Gāndhārī, hands down. (and this is interesting also as an increasing number of early Chinese Buddhist translations are being shown to contain evidence of having been translated from Gāndhārī originals) Surviving Pāli manuscripts are many centuries later, and most other surviving Buddhist manuscripts already date from a period where the spoken vernaculars were being supplanted by BHS (and eventually, more classical Sanskrit). So the Gāndhārī texts provide a precious window into the "vernacular age" that pre-dated the age in which Buddhists moved away from using their own spoken tongues and began to use Pāli and Sanskrit as "church languages" (I have an ancient article on this in case that topic is of interest).

Гандхари живой, разговорный язык буддизма - до перехода на чисто литературные санскрит и пали.

Шарипутра, все дхармы отмечены пустотой; они ни рождаются, ни разрушаются, ни чисты, ни нечисты, ни растут, ни убывают... Поэтому, Шарипутра... Нет старения и смерти... (Сутра Сердца).

Почему тогда не продолжили: нет Первой благородной истины, нет Второй благородной истины и т.д.?

Стал бы я разводить всю эту канитель, если бы "существом" у реформаторов 12-го века условно назывался поток опыта, совокупности дхамм. В том-то и дело, что схоласты 12-го века отошли от базовых общебуддийских представлений. Наставники тхеравадинских Никай и Сангх снова вернулись к ним.

А как Будда в суттах определял существо? Какое определение он давал этому термину?

Отлично, тогда если кто-то избавился от желаний и жажды, то он уже не существо, так?