Continuing my series exploring the Pāli khandhas in the early Buddhist texts as they are interpreted in two books published in 2000: Tilmann Vetter's The Khandha Passages in the Vinayapiṭaka and the Four Main Nikāyas and Sue Hamilton's Early Buddhism: A New Approach. In addition to these main sources I have also started consulting Rupert Gethin's article: “The Five Khandhas: Their Treatment In The Nikāyas And Early Abhidhamma” (1986).
So far I have covered rūpa and vedanā. My verdict on each was that both authors accounts of these terms are problematic. This is partly because of the inordinate weight put, quite uncritically, on the Khajjanīya Sutta (SN 22.79). Because there is a dearth of explanation of the khandhas in Pāli this one sutta that appears to explain them is given privilege. The definitions in the Khajjanīya Sutta turn out to be untrustworthy but this has not stopped them being given pride of place by modern commentators. However explanations of the khandhas do not reflect the general usage in Pāli. If anything a picture that was vague to begin with becomes more deeply obscure.
I suspect that some of us cannot shake the tendency to think of ancient Indian Buddhists as akin to the Greek philosophers. I think we imagine sitting around trying to reason about the world or just discussing it and coming up with grand narratives explaining life, the universe, and everything. We do have accounts of group discussions so they probably did happen, but Indian religieux also pursued a religious lifestyle and this included the religious exercises peculiar to India that we now refer to with the misnomer meditation. A lot of what we read about in Pāli suttas is an idealised account of this lifestyle: men and women leaving behind all social responsibilities and domestic life to pursue the deathless.
It's a mistake to think of the khandhas as the result of metaphysical speculation. The idea that early Buddhists were even interested in existence is on the wrong track. It's clear that Buddhism (and Indian religion in general) is underpinned by altered states of consciousness experienced in meditation, especially by the complete cessation of sense experience while remaining conscious. If Buddhists were speculating about anything, it was about the significance of cessation, the absence of sense experience, and as a corollary, the nature of sense experience. There is no talk of "reality" in early Buddhism (at least in Pāli) so far as I can see. There is a lot of talk about experience.
Rupert Gethin points out that in these sources: upādānakkhandhā = dukkha = loka = satta = ajjhattika-āyatana = sakkāya
"All these expressions apparently represent different ways of characterising the given data of experience or conditioned existence, and are also seen as drawing attention to the structure and the sustaining forces behind it all" (1986: 42).
The caveat is that there is no term that means "conditioned existence". We can say, categorically, that saṅkhāta is compounded with only one word in the Pāli suttas, saṅkhāta-dhamma: there are conditioned dhammas (saṅkhāta-dhammā) but no Pāḷi term that means conditioned existence. Moreover, dhammas are the object of the manas or mind-sense. As I have argued elsewhere, conditioned dhammas refer to sensory experience and the singular unconditioned dhamma (asaṅkhāta-dhamma) is the state of absence of sense experience in which all the conditions for experience are absent (suñña), i.e. nibbāna. This is the broader context in which we have to think about khandhas. In other words we should be in the overlapping domains of phenomenology and epistemology: accounts of the phenomena and knowledge about phenomena; as opposed to accounts of noumena or existence. And this goes double for terms that clearly refer to some mental capacity or function, such as the next khandha, saññā.
By "conditioned existence" Gethin might have meant saṃsāra the rounds of rebirth. But in early Buddhism this is governed by a different, incompatible process, i.e. karma. Dependent arising asserts that there can be no delayed consequences (something Nāgārajuna picks up on centuries later) and karma is all about delayed consequences. Of course, some tried to explain karma in terms of dependent arising but providing the necessary continuity for karma was always a problem because it always contravened the limits imposed by dependent arising.
In any case, let us now consider saññā.
Saññā
A basic colour term is an adjective that is solely used to describe colours, it is at the top level of the taxonomy of colour terms (there is no broader category other than "colour" into which the basic term fits), it is not a recent loan word, it is not a compound word and does not rely on affixes to convey meaning, and in a language-using community basic terms are understood and used by everyone for the same purpose.
Vetter assumes that he has a reliable definition and then leaps to the conclusion that the definition derived from the Khajjanīya Sutta "seems to presuppose some knowledge of a description of a kasina." (24). This is based on the appearance of the four basic colour terms (sans any insights into colour terminology) and of the verb sañjānāti, which occurs over 100 times in the suttas, often in the sense of "he recognises X as X" (cf. Mūlapariyāya Sutta MN I.1). Vetter leaps ahead, yet again, to suggest that this means "he imagines X as X". And I frankly do not follow the reasoning for this second leap. Nor do I follow his reasoning when he leaves behind the context of the khandhas and discusses saññā in a completely different context without making any distinction. We already know that the meanings of these words are sensitive to context. Vetter's citations of the Suttanipāta (25) are for example in the context of a person abandoning views. E.g. 793: "He becomes dissociated from all dhammas that are seen, heard, or thought (mutaṃ)." (which is also seems like a description of the absence of sense experience, doesn't it?). If we are discussing the khandhas then we ought to stick to texts that deal with the khandhas, unless the case is being made that the use with respect to the khandhas is just the ordinary usage. Vetter does not make this case.
Saññā is yet another term that changes its meaning depending on context and over time. Like words such as manas, citta, and viññāna, saññā can just be a general word for mind or mental activity. Vetter suggests that Johansson has it right when he summarises the relevant mental activities as "ideation" (25) and Gethin supports Alex Wayman's suggestion that it means "idea" (1986: 36). Again, this seems to be based on the word in a different context. Moreover, even Gethin is too reliant on the Khajjanīya Sutta and on the modern psychological interpretation of the significance of the colour terms when it comes to saññā. When one says of an object that it is blue, one is not having an idea, one is putting a name to a quality. Perhaps this does involve conceptualisation but that conceptualisation is transparent to the person and would not have been obvious to early Buddhists. I see no evidence that the authors of the Pāli text generally had any insight into this abstract way of thinking about perception. We have to remember the the terms developed in Iron Age India long before sophisticated psychology and theories of consciousness emerged. All the authors I'm considering in this essay seem to be projecting modern ideas backwards and making an anachronism out of saññā (another example of the anachronistic fallacy).
But this is strange, because what one feels is sukha/dukkha/asukhamadukkha, what one recognises is colour, and one what cognises is again sukha/dukkha/asukhamadukkha. Two of these form a related set and one is completely unrelated, unless the colours are somehow a code for combinations of sukha/dukkha. If saññā really is the recognition of colours then the khandhas are incoherent at this point. This is reinforced when we think of saṅkhāra as karmic actions (obviously, I'm jumping the gun here a little), because karmic actions involve grasping the pleasant (sukha) and shunning the unpleasant (dukkha). The khandhas appear to narrowly miss out on having sukha/dukkha as a unifying idea: the appearance, feeling of, recognition, reaction to, and discrimination based on, the pleasantness and unpleasantness of sensory experience.
- papañca as the sum total of the perceptual process: e.g. in M 18, S 35.94 A 3.294, Sn 4.11, Sn 3.6.
- papañca as metaphysical speculation: e.g. in A 4.173
- papañca in relation to 'I am': e.g. in S 35.248, Sn 4.14.
- papañca = kilesas e.g. S 35.248, SA 2.381 (commenting on S 35.94). UdA (commenting on Ud 7.7)
- Sn 4.11: papañca = saññā → nāma & rūpa → phassa → sāta & asāta → canda → piya → macchara etc.
- M 18: rūpa + cakkhu + cakkhu-viññāna → phassa → vedanā/vedeti → sañjānāti → vitakka → papañca.
- D 21: papañcasaññāsaṅkhā → vitakka → chanda → piyāppiya → issā-macchariya → verā etc.
Bibliography