Modern Interpretations of the Khandhas: Saṅkhāra

This is the fourth installment in my series of essays on two modern interpretations of the skandhas. Tilmann Vetter's The Khandha Passages in the Vinayapiṭaka and the Four Main Nikāyas and Sue Hamilton's Early Buddhism: A New Approach were both published in the year 2000. After the rūpa essay was published I found Rupert Gethin's article: “The Five Khandhas: Their Treatment In The Nikāyas And Early Abhidhamma” (1986) which is a valuable document for being a succinct description of what the Sutta-Piṭaka and Abhidhamma say without much extra exegesis or interpretation. 

When I embarked on this task I was optimistic and I thought it might help clarify some things that had long been unclear for me. Sadly, this has not been the case. I am no longer optimistic; very little has been clarified, the methods used by the two main authors leave much to be desired. This realisation comes just as Vetter is hitting his stride and his attempt to explain saṅkhārā and his translation, "impulses", takes up more than half of his entire summary of the khandhas (36 pages!).

In any case, we now come to the khandha of saṅkhārā (The only khandha that is routinely plural). The problem we have with saṅkhārā is that everyone agrees how the word is used, but no one can make sense of why this word is used this way. As Gethin (37) says, the saṅkhārā are "primarily defined in terms of will or volition (cetanā)" and we can relate this to the famous phrase "cetanā is what I call kamma" (AN 6.63). Thus the saṅkhārā are somehow connected to karma (I will say something about this below). However, Gethin also points out that the Nikāyas "describe [saṅkhārā] as putting together (abhisaṃkharonti) each of the khandhas in turn into something that is put-together (saṃkhata) (37). The latter is a reference to the Khajjanīya Sutta that I will also address below. 

Bodhi (2000: 45) tells us that the word saṅkhārā can be analysed as a verb karoti "make" (√kṛ) with a prefix saṃ- that usually means "together" or "complete". In Latin, "to make" is facere and the cognate prefix is con-, so saṅkhāra is very like our word confection. Given the difference between the etymological meaning and the usage in Buddhism, especially in the khandhas, we ought to be alert for our old friend the etymological fallacy (which has been a feature of these essays). Bodhi points to five different contexts in which the word is used. As a khandha, Bodhi translates saṅkhārā as "volitional formations". Another common translation is "karmic formations". Translators who use these phrases as translation are trying to link the two different meanings of the word—volition and confection—in one phrase. The result is rather awkward.

A quick digression on the kha in saṅkhara. If we switch to Sanskrit, the skandha is saṃskārāḥ and through abhisaṃskaronti we get things that are saṃskṛta. But the verb is karoti (√kṛ). The extra s in saṃ-skāra and saṃ-skṛta is there because in Indo-European the root is *sk^u̯er. The s is largely dropped in Vedic and Sanskrit but reappears when some suffixes are added. Sanskrit /sk/ becomes /kh/ in Pāli, so saṃskārāḥ becomes saṇkhārā but /k/ is unchanged so a Sanskrit word like sūtrakāra "the author of the sutra" (where -kāra is also from √kṛ) becomes suttakāra in Pāli. 

 

Vetter

Vetter's method is now settled. He begins by consulting the Khajjanīya Sutta (SN 22.79). And this is vexing because, as I have now repeatedly shown, this text is not a reliable source. It is fool's gold, shiny but not valuable. For the first time, Vetter moves deeper into the Khajjanīya Sutta and considers another  passage. Vetter declares there is no good translation into English and instead gives a German translation that he doesn't bother to translate into English. Fortunately, in that very same year, 2000, Bhikkhu Bodhi's translation of the Saṃyutta Nikāya came out:

Kiñca, bhikkhave, saṅkhāre vadetha? Saṅ­kha­ta­mabhi­saṅ­kha­ron­tīti kho, bhikkhave, tasmā ‘saṅkhārā’ti vuccati. Kiñca saṅ­kha­ta­mabhi­saṅ­kha­ronti? Rūpaṃ rūpattāya saṅ­kha­ta­mabhi­saṅ­kha­ronti, .... (SN III.87). 

“And why, bhikkhus, do you call them volitional formations? ‘They construct the conditioned,’ bhikkhus, therefore they are called volitional formations. And what is the conditioned that they construct? They construct conditioned form as form...” (Bodhi 2000: 915)

Note that what is explained here is not the volitional part, only the formations part. Gethin points to a few other suttas that have this formula. But it's a pericope—the same passage repeated—rather than more on the theme. Vetter's explanation looks post hoc to me. The heart of it is: 

saṅ­kha­ta­m abhi­saṅ­kha­ron­tī ti kho, bhikkhave, tasmā ‘saṅkhārā’ti vuccati. 

They construct (abhisaṁkharonti) the constructed (saṅkhata) therefore (tasmā) they are called (vuccati) the constructs (saṅkhāra). 

It doesn't take much thought to see that this is completely unrelated to karma. Vetter says this is difficult to translate. The first part is not. What is difficult is the repeated formula that comes next. In Bodhi's translation: "They construct conditioned form as form" (rūpaṃ rūpattāya saṅ­kha­ta­m abhi­saṅ­kha­ronti). 

We know the agent must be saṅkhārā since the verb is in the 3rd person plural, which makes rūpaṃ the patient and saṅkhatam an adjective or predicate. So the basic sense is that the "volitions construct appearance" ([saṅkhārā] rūpaṃ abhisaṅkharonti). But this is nonsense, even in Buddhism. We have volitions in response to sense experience, especially in response to the positive and negative hedonic qualities of experience. This is saying the opposite, i.e. that volition is what makes form. To repeat, this is nonsense. 

Worse we still have yet to explain rūpattāya. One of the difficulties is that rūpattā is an abstract noun, which I am at a loss to translate directly into English: "form-ness"? We tend to treat rūpa as abstraction in the first place, both as the traditional translation "form" and in my preferred translation "appearance". We know this partly because when we use form in this sense we don't include articles. It is not "a form" or "the form" but just "form". My grammar checker doesn't deal with abstract nouns very well and pings me on this every time. And I think this might explain why Bodhi's translation does not distinguish between rūpa and rūpattā. Effectively they mean the same thing in Buddhist English. I have my doubts that they mean the same thing in Pāli, but I don't understand what the distinction is. 

Unfortunately, rūpattāya is a degenerate case ending that could be instrumental, dative, ablative, or genitive. Not all of which can fit, though, so we have some options: the saṅkhārās construct form through form-ness (ins), for form-ness (dat), from formness (abl), or saṅkhārās construct form that is formness (indirect object). The latter is apparently how Bodhi reads it, but as I say he translates both rūpa and rūpattā as "form". His explanation follows the commentary (2000: 1071-2 n.113), i.e. the passage means that form "becomes conditioned form in accordance with its nature". This doesn't seem remotely connected to the khandhas or their functions. Nor does it link saṅkhārā to karma. Form is conditioned when considered as the object of the eye, but we are talking khandhas. In what sense does the rūpakhandha become a conditioned thing? It is conditioned.

Once again the Khajjanīya Sutta (SN 22.79) is tempting because it appears to offer an explanation of the khandhas that is lacking elsewhere, but once again the explanation turns out to be impenetrable or nonsensical. My view is that the suttakāra did not know why the word saṅkhārā was used in this context and tried to make something up based on the obvious etymology. But this does not shed any light on how the word saṅkhārā is used in Pāli. But it did start an long running attempt to shoehorn the literal meaning of saṅkhārā into explanations of the khandhas. 

Vetter carries on for 36 pages of learned discourse, looking at literally all the ways in which the word is used, with examples. But he never manages a convincing explanation. Working through all of this has become intensely irritating because it appears to be wilfully ignorant of the manifold textual and linguistic problems. Bodhi can be forgiven because he is a senior Theravādin monk with responsibilities and is thus naturally an apologist for the tradition. Vetter has no such excuse for failing to read this material critically. 

So I'm just going to move on. And yet this brings me no joy.

Hamilton

As Hamilton says, "The order of the khandhas is never explained, but they are almost invariably (the single exception being to accommodate the metre of a verse) in the order given above; that is, body, sensations, apperception, volitional activities, consciousness." (72). We are slightly surprised, then, when in the succeeding pages she describes her understanding of body, sensations, apperception, and consciousness, and then introduces "The fifth khanda of volitional activities" (78). Because it is not the fifth khandha, it is the fourth khandha. 

Hamilton describes saṅkhārā as "one's affective response to what one is experiencing" (78). She rightly notes the centrality of karma in Buddhist soteriology and of volitions to karma: "The aim of the path of Buddhism is to arrive at a point when the fuel of continuity is blown out, and it is volitions that are that fuel." (78). 

But affect is not equivalent to volition: affect is a very much broader category. Whether used in a technical or lay sense, affect is a general way of talking about emotional or felt responses to sensory experience (the word literally means "to have an effect"). Volition is related in the sense that emotions usually lie behind actions. The problem is that Pāli doesn't really have this EMOTIONS ARE AGENTS metaphor.  In fact, as I have noted elsewhere, Pāli doesn't consider emotions separately from what we would call cognitive activity. Pāli makes a distinction between physical (kāyika) and mental (cetasika) events, but does not distinguish emotions as a distinct category. 

Hamilton then draws attention to none other than the passage from the Khajjanīya Sutta just discussed. In her account, abhisamkharonti means "to volitionally construct". Except that this is not what the word means or how it is used. Here volitionally is an adverb that Hamilton has tacked onto the verb, in a way that looks tendentious - it suits her argument to translate it this way. 

This is not the only problem we encounter in the details of Hamilton's account of saṅkhārā. In her view: 

"the khandhas that are described as being volitionally constructed need to be interpreted in the sense that together they represent the entire human being. So it is one's volitional activities that determine one's future coming-to-be in its entirety. (80). 

And yet two pages earlier:

Understanding them as the individual physical and mental 'parts' of which a human being is comprised misses two crucial points. First, that it is collectively that they operate, and second, perhaps even more importantly, that what they represent is one's cognitive system: the apparatus by means of which we have all our experiences. The point is not to offer an analysis of all that we are... Rather, they are what one needs to understand about oneself in one is to achieve liberation from the cycle of lives as the Buddha did. (78) 

These two passages seem to contradict each other. And the main drift of Hamilton's argument is in favor of the second reading. The khandhas do not represent the entire human being, they represent what we need to understand in the pursuit of liberation. Specifically they tie the perceptual/cognitive process to karma. 

But of course, Hamilton has the same problem as Vetter in using this passage, i.e. that it is deceptive because the khandhas are not "volitionally constructed". Neither rūpa nor vedanā are volitional. Except, while dwelling in emptiness (suññatā-vihāra), we are bound to experience both without having any say in the matter. We have free won't over rūpa and vedanā if we practice meditation, but we don't have free will.

And at this point I feel like I'm getting nowhere. So again, I'm going to move on. 

How Does Saṅkhārā Relate to Karma?

As we saw above we can make the link between saṅkhārā and karma via cetanā. This is because saṅkhārā are often described in Pāli in terms of the six kinds of cetanā. For example, in the Upādānaparipavatta Sutta (SN 22.56):

katame ca, bhikkhave, saṅkhārā? chayime, bhikkhave, cetanākāyā – rūpasañcetanā, saddasañcetanā, gandhasañcetanā, rasasañcetanā, phoṭṭhabbasañcetanā, dhammasañcetanā. (SN III.60)

And what, monks, is volition? Monks, there are six kinds of intention: intention towards appearance, sounds, smells, tastes, tangibles, and mental events. 

The text switches from cetanā to sañcetanā but there is no discernible change in meaning. But there is no logic here. No one, as far as I can see, can explain why a word the denotes confection can connote volition. Where is the link? The connection between cetanā and karma is much easier. Which brings us back to the Nibbedhika Sutta (AN 6.63):

cetanāhaṃ, bhikkhave, kammaṃ vadāmi. cetayitvā kammaṃ karoti – kāyena vācāya manasā. (A III.409)

Monks intention is what I call karma. Having intended one acts, with body, voice, or mind. 

Hence, volition is karma. As Vetter notes, this is only one way of talking about karma and not the most common. The equation cetanāhaṃ kammaṃ vadāmi occurs only once in the Nikāyas though it is clearly important as it is picked up by later writers, especially Nāgārjuna (in his MMK chapter on karma). 

But how are saṅkhārā equated with volition? 

I think there is a more direct link between saṅkhārā and karma, and this draws inspiration from work by Joanna Jurewicz (2005) on how Pāli might have borrowed terms from Vedic religion. This is made easier if we move the discussion into Sanskrit again, in which case saṅkhārā becomes saṁskārāḥ.

Saṃskāra is a word familiar to anyone who knows about Vedic culture, where it means a rite of passage. In this context saṃskāra means something like occasion or consecration. It is a feature of words from √kṛ that their meaning is highly context dependent. The prefix saṃ- does not just mean "together" it also means "complete" and from this we get the sense of "perfected". So saṃskāra can mean "finishing, refining, perfecting" and it is used in many figurative ways such as "purification, cleansing, preparing, or rearing of animals". 

 There are typically sixteen rites of passage (saṃskārāḥ) for a twice-born Hindu (for an overview see for example, Klostermaier 1994: 183-92). In fact, different texts prescribe different numbers of sacraments, but sixteen is the most common number. The saṁskāra are rituals conducted at certain points in the life of orthodox Hindus, including birth, naming, first haircut, marriage, and death. The rite of passage puts the finishing touch on the stage of life. It helps to refine the recipient's life and helps them attain the purity required for mokṣa. 

As Klostermaier says, "It is through the performance of saṃskāras that all Hindus practice the karma-mārga, the Path of Works" (1994: 192). The karmamārga  was previously introduced by Klostermaier in two chapters (9 and 10) and is contrasted with the jñānamārga (path of knowledge). The karmamārga is prescribed for people (men) who follow the householder's life of that Zorba the Greek called the "full catastrophe": wife, children, house, property, business. The jñānamārga is for those who renounce the household life and seek mokṣa or liberation from rebirth. 

Thus a saṃskāra is an occasion on which karma is performed by those pursuing the karmamārga as prescribed by the Dharmaśāstra texts outlining the dharma or religious duties of someone who follows some form of Vedic religion. Buddhists borrowed this idea and incorporated it with little change into their own doctrines. It has been changed mainly by the emphasis on the internalisation and ethicisation of religion; i.e. the focus for Buddhists was not the external performance of ritual actions aimed at manipulating the world, but was instead internal—volitional—and aimed at the world of experience. If one makes no effort at purifying one's intentions, one performs karma that leads to rebirth, i.e. one follows the karma-mārga. Buddhism holds out the possibility that by purifying one's intentions one does not perform karma, and one eventually brings rebirth to a halt. Not being reborn, one is free from suffering, since suffering is associated with embodiment.

The attempts—ancient and modern—to fit the semantic meaning of "confections" or "formations" to saṅkhārākhandha seem to me to be a red herring based on the etymological fallacy (the idea that the meaning of a word can only be obtained by examining the morphology, the past use, and the meaning of the parts of the word. Because the word is not defined this way in this case, such attempts are at best confusing and unconvincing. At worst they are nonsensical.

In this context saṅkhārā seems to straight-forwardly mean volitions (cetanā), i.e. contributions to karma that fuel rebirth. And since understanding how we create karma is central to Buddhist soteriology, this makes sense.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Bodhi. 2000. The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Saṃyutta Nikāya. Wisdom.

Gethin, Rupert. 1986. “The Five Khandhas: Their Treatment In The Nikāyas And Early Abhidhamma.” Journal Of Indian Philosophy 14(1): 35-53.

Hamilton, Sue. 1996. Identity and experience: the constitution of the human being according to early Buddhism. London: Luzac Oriental.

Hamilton, Sue. 2000. Early Buddhism: A New Approach. London: Routledge.

Jurewicz, Joanna. (2005) "Playing with Fire: The pratītyasamutpāda from the perspective of Vedic thought." In Buddhism: Critical Concepts in Religious Studies, Vol. I, edited by Paul Williams. Psychology Press. Originally published 2000 Journal of the Pali Text Society 26 pp. 77-103.

Klostermaier, Klaus K. 1994. A Survey of Hinduism. 2nd Ed. State University of New York Press.

Vetter, Tilmann. 2000. The Khandha Passages in the Vinayapiṭaka and the Four Main Nikāyas. Wien Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.

Modern Interpretations of the Khandhas: Saññā

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

In defining saññā, Vetter continues to draw on the problematic Khajjanīya Sutta (SN 22.79) by asserting that "saññā is derived from sañjānāti" (24). It might be better to say that, in this rather odd and unrepresentative sutta, the word saññā is explained by the verb sañjānāti and that the two words are derived from the same affix-verbal root combination: saṃ√jñā. The verb sañjānāti typically refers to the act of recognition and putting a name to something. The Khajjanīya Sutta elaborates on this theme of recognition by naming four colours. And in the light of psychology this invokes the more involved idea of perception (rather than naming) or in Hamilton's case apperception, i.e. "perception in the cognitive rather than in (just) the visual sense" (76). Gethin, too, references the colours as part of the definition.

Note that the colours named are the four "basic" colour terms in Pāḷi: nīla "dark/black", pītaka "yellow", lohita "red/brown", and odata "light/white". And this deserves a digression. Here "basic" is a jargon term with a very specific, if somewhat contested, meaning, the definition of which takes up a whole chapter in C. P. Biggam's The Semantics of Colour: A Historical Approach (2012). Since Biggam identifies nineteen potential headings under which to discuss the concept of basicness we could easily get bogged down. I will give a simple definition and suggest readers consult Biggam for a more comprehensive discussion of this fascinating idea. For our purposes:

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.

With respect to the basic colours in Pāli, note that nīla does not mean "blue" until considerably later, here it means "dark" and this takes in black, blue, green, brown, grey, etc. Thus, while a blue object would be labelled nīla, not all nīla-coloured objects would be blue. The Sanskrit of this period also has just four basic colour terms, as does Homeric Greek. See also my essay Seeing Blue (6 Mar 2015). Colour terms evolve in predictable ways, so that if a language has four basic colour terms one of the expected lines of development is to first split off red from light-coloured and then to distinguish red and yellow. And we confidently predict that the next colour to be added will be blue or green. And so on. So the colours named in the sutta are not arbitrary or random. We have eleven basic colour terms in English: black, white, red, yellow, green, blue, brown, purple, grey, pink, orange. I suspect that, like some other languages, English begins to distinguish blue from cyan at a basic level.

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 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).

A deeper sense of incoherence emerges when we see an alternative set of three khandhas in the Mahāvedalla Sutta (MN 43) where they are also matched to verbs from the same root: viññāṇa/vijānāti, vedanā/vedeti, and saññā/sanjānāti. The sutta tells us that viññāna cognises (vijānāti) pleasant, painful, and neutral; Vedanā experiences (vedeti) pleasant, painful, and neutral, while saññā recognises (sañjānāti) dark, yellow, red, and white (Note the first three colours are given in the form nīlaka, pītaka, lohitaka, where -ka can be adjectival with a possessive sense or diminutive). Here, the three factors are in a different order than we are used to meeting them. The text tells us, however, that they are conjoined and inseparable (ime dhammā saṃsaṭṭhā, no visaṃsaṭṭhā. MN I 293) and this is because "What one feels, that one recognises; and what one recognises, that one cognises." (yaṃ vedeti taṃ sañjānāti, yaṃ sañjānāti taṃ vijānāti). And this is the order we meet in the khandha passages.

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.

Hamilton, as noted, translates saññā as "apperception" and associates with the action of "identifying" (76). "What one is doing in this process, according to the texts, is making manifold and naming what one is experiencing." (76). Unfortunately, with the terminology of "making manifold" Hamilton is at her least clear and her usual practice of referring to which texts she is referring breaks down. Hamilton appears to insist on a metaphysical interpretation of dependent arising against her own stated view that dependent arising describes experience (which is an epistemic or phenomenological interpretation). She appears to believe that dependent arising entails an undifferentiated world in which nothing is distinguished, and that identifying individual objects in this undifferentiated mass is "making manifold", Hamilton's translation of papañca. Papañca is in fact another tricky and under-defined concept that I have studied in some depth in two essays from 2012: Translating Papañca and Understanding Prapañca.

What Hamilton does not say is that the texts that use the word papañca are confused. There are four distinct ways of talking about papañca:

• 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)

Moreover, when it comes to the process, the term refers to three distinct sequences of terms that appear to describe a process and they all disagree on the order in which the process happens. That is:

• 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.

No one can say definitively that papañca is one thing or the other. There is no overarching definition that fits every mention of it and Hamilton has simply chosen the definition which best fits her theory. As much as I find her theory useful, I don't find this aspect of it at all convincing. As I said in 2012: "What my study seems to say is that the ambiguity of papañca allows it to be co-opted to suit the agenda of the commentator.". Back then I was still puzzled by the lack of coherence in a Buddhist doctrine. Since then I have realised that incoherence is the norm.

Given Hamilton's emphasis on experience and the lurch into metaphysics at this point (undifferentiated reality vs objectified experience) her work here becomes practically useless. I retain enough naivete to find this quite disappointing.

Conclusions

I think colours associated with saññā in the context of the khandhas are a red herring. The colour words trigger particular associations in a modern reader that seem unrelated to how people in Iron Age India conceived of their world. We can be sure that they did not think in terms of psychology. We know that they didn't think of the mind at all like we do, as I show in my essay The 'Mind as Container' Metaphor.

There is a distinction between inventing a way of reading texts (a hermeneutic) that makes sense on our terms and seeking to understand how the authors understood the texts. The former ignores the meaning of the text qua text and opts for something that fits modern preconceptions. This is the approach of all the modern Buddhists that I know. Stepping outside this modernist insider approach to really read the texts and to unearth the mode of thought of the authors is difficult and perhaps ultimately impossible. However, the textual scholar is bound to try to do this and to highlight how they go about it.

Sanskrit dictionaries tell us that saṃjñā means "agreement, mutual understanding; consciousness, understanding; sign, token, signal; name, appellation"; while the verb means "to agree, to be of the same opinion; to appoint, assign, to acknowledge, to recognise; to claim, take possession". So the etymology offers a rich semantic field from which to choose, but "ideation" and "idea" don't really come up. At the outside edge of this we could imagine "perception" but really only if we employ psychology anachronistically. Of course, we have to avoid the etymological fallacy and keep in mind that the use may be unrelated to the etymology. Still, the usage still has to make some kind of sense.

We seem to come back to recognition as the principle idea associated with the word and the most likely application in this context also. The problem is that this is the conclusion of none of my informants. This feels a little awkward. The influence of the Khajjanīya Sutta on modern discussions of the khandhas continues to be problematic. Why was it not read critically by scholars? It seems that in the absence of a precise and coherent explanation this text was adopted as the next best thing. But it cannot carry this weight.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Biggam, C. P. 2012. The Semantics of Colour: A Historical Approach. Cambridge University Press.

Gethin, Rupert. 1986. “The Five Khandhas: Their Treatment In The Nikāyas And Early Abhidhamma.” Journal Of Indian Philosophy 14(1): 35-53.

Hamilton, Sue. 1996. Identity and experience: the constitution of the human being according to early Buddhism. London: Luzac Oriental.

Hamilton, Sue. 2000. Early Buddhism: A New Approach. London: Routledge.

Vetter, Tilmann. 2000. The Khandha Passages in the Vinayapiṭaka and the Four Main Nikāyas. Wien Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.

Modern Interpretations of the Khandhas: Intro and Rūpa

Thanks to a benefactor I was able to purchase a copy of Tilmann Vetter's The Khandha Passages, which came out in 2000. The book is largely what it says, i.e. a collection of Pāli passages related to the khandhas in a single volume. It came out in the same year as Sue Hamilton's book Early Buddhism: A New Approach (2000). In this essay (in two parts), I aim to summarise and critique aspects of Vetter's overview of the khandhas (2000: 19-82) and to compare and contrast with Hamilton's overview (2000: 72-84). The aim is to create a synthesis based on these two indepth, nonsectarian studies. In part one I'll introduce the topic and cover rūpakkandha.

Vetter is aware of (cites) Hamilton's earlier book on the khandhas, Identity and Experience (1996) but he makes little use of it and (surprisingly) says that there has been no comprehensive study of Pāḷi khandha passages. Identity and Experience is an edited version of Hamilton's doctoral dissertation and looked at every occurrence of the khandha in the four Nikāyas. Vetter includes the uses of khandha in the Vinaya and perhaps this is what he means by "comprehensive". Pāli as a language and the ideas conveyed in it both exist in layers. A comprehensive account would include comments on the diachronic as well as synchronic uses of the word. Hamilton, with some justification, treats the Nikāyas as a single chronological unit; Vetter, with less justification, treats the Vinaya as part of the same chronological unit. While there is minimal evidence for stratification in the Nikāyas, there is some. Unfortunately, Vetter proposes a chronological development of the relevant terminology but does not attempt to tie this to the chronological development of the Nikāyas. 

In some places the five khandhas are only four (Vetter 2000: 15, n. 12), i.e. rūpa, vedanā, saññā, and saṅkhāra (e.g. AN. 4.16). Also, the five khandhas appear to have been unknown to the original compilers of the Dīghanikāya or Aṅguttaranikāya. Vetter mentions these two facts in passing and moves on, since they are incidental to his project. However, such discrepancies really ought to catch our attention and motivate us to explain them. 

In Pāli, there are two terms for the five items collectively: khandha and upādānakkhandha. Sometimes these two words are synonymous, though sometimes they are opposed (e.g. Sn 22.48). However, upādānakkhandha is by far the most common term. Vetter takes this to mean that the collection of five khandhas came first (sans-label), then were labelled upādānakkhandha, which was later abbreviated with khandha (2000: 19). This is of course possible but the rationale for it is weak. What if the kandha/upādānkkhandha is a sectarian difference? Or geographical? 

Vetter overlooks or ignores Richard Gombrich's observations about the word khandha when used in words such as aggikhandha and dukkhakhanda (1996: 67-9). Gombrich placed the term within the context of an extended cognitive metaphor: EXPERIENCE IS FIRE (Cf. Lakoff and Johnson). Buddhist texts make broad use of this metaphor to characterise sensory experience and the khandhas are another way of talking about experience. And in the context of fire, upādāna takes the meaning "fuel". The khandas, in this view, are the fuel that supports the fire that is experience. A key to this is the Ādittipariyāya (SN 35:28), in which the Buddha is made to say "everything is on fire" (sabbaṃ ādittaṃ). And what is "everything", it is the sense faculties and sense objects (i.e. rūpa qua appearance rather than substance), i.e. sensory experience is on fire (compare this to the Sabba Sutta, SN 35.23 and the subsequent suttas). From Hamilton we know that "dukkha is not contingent to experience. Rather, one cannot have experience that is not dukkha" (2000: 68) and "dukkha is better understood as the fact of experience" (71). Note that Gombrich was Sue Hamilton's PhD supervisor and he was strongly influenced by her conclusions about the khandhas. 

Hamilton notes: 

"The term [khandha] is not one used by any of the other religious teachers of the day, and they are hardly explained in any coherent way anywhere in the Sutta Piṭaka: there is no text which gives a full and clear account of what is being referred to by the term khandha. (2000: 70. Emphasis added)

Nevertheless, khandhas are mentioned frequently in early Buddhist texts and form an essential part of later Buddhist metaphysics (especially in accounts of Prajñāpāramitā). I outlined the etymology and meaning of word khandha (Skt. skandha) in an essay in 2013: Pañca-skandha: Etymology and Dynamics. The etymology is obscure, but seems to relate to the idea of "branch" and, in particular, the way the torso branches into limbs and the arm branches into five fingers. Hamilton (1996) notes that, in Vedic, skandha means "trunk" as in the trunk of a tree, but she provides no references for this. I have also proposed that the word prapañca relates to this branching of the arm into five fingers. I often refer to pañcakkandha as "the five branches of experience".

Following his assumed pattern of historical development, Vetter opts to define the individual khandhas first (20-73) then the terms upādānakkhandha and khandha (73-82). He notes that outside of this context several of the terms have other uses and are defined accordingly. This is common in Buddhist literature. Sometimes context is all important in deciding how a word is being used. 

Vetter relies on the Khajjanīya Sutta (SN 22.79) for his definitions because it is "the only passage in Vinaya- and Sutta-piṭaka where an attempt has been made to 'define' all five items" (19). It will soon be apparent why this source is problematic, but in advance Vetter notes that the sutta is "late" according to his understanding of the development of the terminology (it uses the term upādānakkhandha). It's not clear what "late" means here (since Vetter has already asserted that the use of upādānakkhandha predates the use of khandha) and, as I noted, this is not connected with any of the descriptions of the chronological stratification of the suttas. This brings to mind Jan Nattier's quip about textual stratification:

"If I like it, it's early; if I specialise in it, it's very early; if I don't like it at all, but it's in my text, it's an interpolation." (2002: 49)

Vetter gives some obvious caveats—the text could be late, it is stylistically different, and definitions are inconsistent (19). Still, when it comes down to it, Vetter starts with this text and is much less critical than I would like him to be.

Rūpa

Vetter's definition of rūpa is the shortest of his book, which is focussed more on saṅkhāra and viññāna. I think this is a little unfortunate because some important nuances are lost in the process. Vetter (20) notes that rūpa is often defined with respect to the verb ruppati "harm, suffer". This definition is confused, precisely because of the passage found in the Khajjanīya Sutta which relates the five nouns that make up the khandhas to five verbs ostensibly from the same root. Abbreviating, we get:

Ruppatīti kho, bhikkhave, tasmā ‘rūpa’nti vuccati... Vedayatīti kho, bhikkhave, tasmā ‘vedanā’ti vuccati... Sañjānātīti kho, bhikkhave, tasmā ‘saññā’ti vuccati... Saṅkhatam abhisaṅkharontīti kho, bhikkhave, tasmā ‘saṅkhārā’ti vuccati...Vijānātīti kho, bhikkhave, tasmā ‘viññāṇa’nti vuccati. (SN III.86-7)

It harms, monks, therefore it is called "form", it feels, therefore it is called "feeling", it perceives, therefore it is called "perception", it constructs the constructed, therefore it is called "construct", it cognizes, therefore it is called "cognition."

Even with only my English translation anyone can see that something is wrong here. There is a pattern and the rūpa passage does not conform to it. The reason is that someone has misread the text. It is simply incorrect to derive rūpa from √rup "to break, to harm", which has a indicative form ruppati (Skt rupyati; causative ropayati). Compare a similar passage in the Large Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra:

tathā hi śāradvatīputra yā rūpaśunyatā na sā rūpayati | yā vedanāśunyatā na sā vedayati | yā saṃjñāśunyatā na sā saṃjānāti | yā saṃskāraśunyatā na sābhisaṃskaroti | yā vijñānaśunyatā na sā vijānāti | (Karashima et al. 2016, 21r–v).

“Therefore Śāriputra, what is empty of form does not form; what is empty of feeling does not feel; what is empty of perception does not perceive; what is empty of willing does not will; and what is empty of cognition does not cognise.”

Here, instead of a verb from √rup we find the denominative of rūpa, i.e. rūpayati "appears, forms". The expected Pāli form—rūpayati or rūpeti—does not occur in the Nikāyas. Examples of denominatives from Warder's Introduction to Pali (316-7) include sukheti "he is happy" (from sukha "happy"), tīreti "he accomplishes"  (from tīra "river bank, shore"), and udāneti "he speaks joyously" (from udāna "a joyous utterance") This tautological definition of rūpa does fit the pattern noted above: "it appears, therefore it is called appearance."

It's not just that rūpa is unrelated to ruppati but that the definition of rūpa in the Khajjanīya Sutta makes no sense. Vetter calls the Pāḷi etymology "doubtful" (20) but it's just wrong and it is not clear why he prevaricates on such an obvious mistake. However, this text does a lot of heavy lifting in his definition of rūpa. In fact, Vetter's understanding of rūpa as "body" appears to be based mainly on the Khajjanīya Sutta where, having mistakenly equated rūpa with ruppati, "harming", the text continues to ask "by what is it harmed? (kena ruppati). The answer is: 

sītenapi ruppati, uṇhenapi ruppati, jighacchāyapi ruppati, pipāsāyapi ruppati, ḍaṃsamaka-savātātapa-sarīsapa-samphassenapi ruppati. (SN III.86)

It is harmed by cold. It is harmed by heat. It is harmed by hunger. It is harmed by thirst. It is harmed by contact with flies, mosquitoes, wind, sun, and snakes.

Note that Bodhi (2000: 915) has opted to translate ruppati here as "deformed". One can see that he is trying to pun on rūpa as "form" but this falls flat in my view. Clearly this text suggests that rūpa means "body" and Vetter appears to rely on this text as his main support. But we've just shown that the author of this text was confused. This text is wrong about the definition of rūpa as ruppati (rather the rūpayati). The issue of what is harmed is not relevant given that "harm" is the wrong word. The question is what appears? In which case, why should we take this text seriously, let alone as definitional? Even with scripture, one has to evaluate the quality of sources. Not all suttas were created equal. 

Worse, Pāli has a number of words for body and Vetter says:

"[rūpa] was probably preferred to other words for body such as kāya, deha or sarīra, because it showed the body as attract to the eye, and as such causing attachment." (2000: 20. Emphasis added)

The etymological confusion notwithstanding, this is a poor explanation. This is a central Buddhist doctrine. Vetter has to guess at the meaning here precisely because this important and oft-used term is not defined by early Buddhists themselves and is not drawn from other religious teachings (unlike saññā, saṅkhāra, and vijñāna). But I think here he has guessed wrong. 

Rūpa doesn't primarily mean "body" and, as Vetter notes, there are a number of words that are consistently used in this sense (kāya, deha, sarīra) although curiously "body" is a derived sense the case of kāya "collection" and deha means "moulded". The etymology of sarīra is not clear. Generally, rūpa means "outward appearance" and early Buddhists used words for body when they meant body. For example, the sense of touch has body (kāya) as its organ and tangibles (P. phoṭṭhabbā; Skt. spraṣṭavya) are its objects.

In sensory terms, rūpa is to the eye what sound is to the ear, i.e. it is not the matter or substance of an object but the visual stimulus that reaches the eye considered independently of the object. Even though we may say "I hear a conch", we know this is shorthand for "I hear the sound of a conch". We don't hear the object, we hear the sound it gives off. Similarly rūpa as sense object is the visual impression that the object gives off, not the object itself. This aspect of Buddhist epistemology is thoroughly confused across the board of Buddhist exegesis. 

Of course, the context here is different. It is possible for rūpa to mean something else, but it strikes me as unlikely that it means "body" in any context. Vetter's argument is based on misreadings and guesses which does not inspire confidence. 

Sue Hamilton also translates rūpa as "body"; however, she adds: "It is not the matter of the body qua matter that is relevant, but that one's body is the physical locus of one's experience" (2000: 72) and "A central feature of the body is that it is the locus of the senses, which further emphasises that what is being referred to here is the living functioning body and not just its substance" (73). 

There is a question here regarding the nature of experience as understood by moderns and ancients. See for example my 2012 essay, The 'Mind as Container' Metaphor. It seems entirely natural in the modern Anglosphere to think of experience as occurring in a "theatre", as being internal to us and contained in our minds. This also a cognitive metaphor: THE MIND IS A CONTAINER. What I argue in that essay is that Pāli texts lack this metaphor. I have not seen any evidence that they had the metaphor of the body as container either, certainly not of experience. Here I think Hamilton's approach is problematic. It seems so obvious and intuitive to us what kind of thing that sensory experience is. But our views are socially conditioned and not as natural as we think. I'm not convinced by the "locus of experience" idea. But I also think it's an open question: my blog posts are fairly thorough but not peer-reviewed. I aim for them to be topics of serious discussion, not definitive statements.  

Part of the reason for taking rūpa to concretely mean "body" is that it is said to be composed of body parts. In Buddhist meditations, such as found in the Satipaṭṭḥāna Sutta (MN 10) or the Kāyagatāsati Sutta (MN 119), one contemplates rūpa in the body by imaginatively noting all the constituent parts including things like viscera and bones (one cannot directly experience one's viscera or bones, for example, so the practice must be imaginative). But note here that it is kāya (literally "the collection") that is treated thus, not rūpa. We've already seen that Buddhist definitions of jargon terms are highly context dependent. So the idea that a definition or understanding  of kāya is directly applicable without any caveats to a definition of rūpa in a whole different context is dubious at best. Both authors have made a rather devious manoeuver here and have hidden it with hand waving. 

Vetter and Hamilton (at much greater length) also observe that rūpa is defined as the four great elements, i.e. catumahābhūta: paṭhavī, apo, tejo, vāyu or  earth, water, fire, and wind. Here it is definitely rūpa in the context of the khandhas that is defined and we are back on track. Still, as Noa Ronkin points out: 

"[the elements] are not meant to give an account of matter as constitutive of external, mind-independent reality" (2005: 56). 

Rather the words are used metaphorically for aspects of experience. Earth represents solidity; water, fluidity and cohesion; fire, heat; and wind, movement. The temptation to read the mahābhūtas as synonymous with the Greek four element theory is strong, but early Buddhists were not theorising about metaphysics as the Greeks were. Strangely, given the thesis of her book, Hamilton notes the metaphorical use but seems to stop short of acknowledging the implications of it - i.e. that kāya does not appear to mean "body" in this context. It may at best mean the experience of body or embodiment. 

Generally speaking, then, rūpa is not an ontological term; it is an epistemic term. It refers to the visual appearance of objects, not to objects per se, nor to the matter they are made of (on which subject the suttas are silent). And most dictionaries seem to take this view also. On the other hand, some Pāli suttas clearly do use rūpa as a ontological term and consider it to mean "body", although this is associated with a mistaken folk etymology of ruppati. And this definition has crept into dictionaries as well. 

Vetter's definition of rūpa as "body" is an inauspicious beginning because it means that he leans into the idea of rūpa as "substance" rather than rūpa as "appearance". In fact he specifically rejects the definition as "visible form" (20). Where the word rūpa is equated with "body" is precisely where it is confused with Pāli ruppati in exegesis. And this mistake is not repeated in some other occurrences outside the Theravāda tradition. 

Conclusion

It's worth repeating that the khandhas are never clearly defined in the early Buddhist texts. One of the partial definitions is either based on a misreading (rupyati "harm" for the denominative rūpayati "appear") or it is a tautology "appearance is that which appears". Either way this is not helpful. That scholars conflate definitions and overlook context when it is convenient is not helpful either. Both Vetter and Hamilton make the issue seem more clear than it is. The one thing it seems rūpa cannot be is the body as substance. Whether Hamilton's reading of body as "locus of experience" is what was intended is moot, but I have doubts how this would fit the context since the relevant cognitive metaphor is missing from Pāli as far as I can tell.

Another problem I have with rūpa qua body, is how anyone can think that body makes a set with vedanā, saññā, saṅkhārā, and viññāna. The body and four terms concerned with mental functioning. Some Buddhists make an analogy with the term nāma-rūpa "name and appearance". However, as I pointed out in 2011 in my essay, Nāmarūpa, this term too is vague and can't really serve as an anchor for other definitions. The Pāli tradition is conflicted as to what constitutes nāmarūpa, a term borrowed from late Vedic literature. Furthermore, Buddhists more characteristically used a threefold division of the person into body, speech, and mind (kāya, vāca, citta) and speech does not easily fit into the khandha analysis (note the threefold division does not occur in Vedic literature, but it does occur in pre-Buddhist Zoroastrian literature). In addition, vedanā, saññā, saṅkhārā, and viññāna are all epistemic terms (in Buddhism) and if there is any pattern then rūpa should also be an epistemic term, i.e. appearance rather than substance. The set of khandhas cannot possibly accommodate "all phenomena" even if many Buddhists consider this plausible based on a very old tradition. Even if we follow Hamilton and reduce the scope of early Buddhist interest to just experience (as opposed to reality), there is still an explanatory gap between rūpa and the other four khandā (and missing vāca).

How do we know we have a body? Because we feel it and see it. Note that when these two channels of information get out of sync we have out-of-body experiences as Thomas Metzinger described in The Ego Tunnel. Feeling and seeing are sensory experiences. So our awareness of our body, as with all other instances of intentional awareness is subjective by definition. Moreover, one of the most common altered states that occurs early in meditation is that our sense of embodiment is affected. The body may feel very large, for example, or very light. Or we may lose our sense of being located in space. As we go deeper we may lose our sense of being extended or bounded in space. 

Later Buddhist traditions notwithstanding, I don't think "the body" can be what is meant by rūpakkhandha. I keep coming back to the basic idea that rūpa is to the eye what sound is to the ear. Clearly rūpakkhandha is some kind of abstraction or metaphor (perhaps a metonym) based on this idea. Lacking a clear definition, Buddhist traditions drifted into various interpretations based on the needs of sectarian doctrinal entailments. Making sense of rūpakkhanda may well be impossible given what we have to work with, at least in terms of first principles. The idea that it must make sense is plausible enough and I'm sympathetic to it, but it should be not become a defence of procrustean efforts to force the definition to fit. Similarly, I'm sympathetic with attempts to reverse engineer what kind of thing rūpakkhanda might be based on the hermeneutics of later, but still ancient, exegetes. But we cannot discount the possibility that they were just as much in the dark as we are. And we have to take into account that in the ancient world exegetes were firmly embedded in sectarian doctrinal systems. 

This level of confusion of terminology, definition, and application so close to the centre of Buddhist orthodoxy is fascinating. And it makes me wonder why I seem to be almost alone in being fascinated by it. I'm reading two professional academics on the subject (writing 20 years ago!), both of whom were trying to smooth over the inconsistencies and present what's in the suttas as a coherent discourse. But that is the job of theologians or religieux not the job of academics! Why are they not studying the content of the texts critically? This seems very weird to me. 

Next up the other khandas, but I haven't even started yet so don't hold your breath. 

Bibliography

Attwood, J. 2018. "Defining Vedanā: Through the Looking Glass." Contemporary Buddhism, 18(3): 31-46. https://doi.org/10.1080/14639947.2018.1450959

Bodhi. 2000. The Connected Discourses of the Buddha. Wisdom. 

Gombrich, Richard F. 1996. How Buddhism Began: The Conditioned Genesis of the Early Teachings. London, Athlone. Reprint New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 2007. 

Hamilton, Sue. 1996. Identity and experience: the constitution of the human being according to early Buddhism. London: Luzac Oriental.

Hamilton, Sue. 2000. Early Buddhism: A New Approach. London: Routledge.

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (2003). Metaphors We Live By. New Ed. University of Chicago Press.

Ronkin, Noa. 2005. Early Buddhist Metaphysics the Making of a Philosophical Tradition. Routledge.

Vetter, Tilmann. 2000. The Khandha Passages in the Vinayapiṭaka and the Four Main Nikāyas. Wien Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.

First Person Perspective

McCory Photography

I've already blogged about Thomas Metzinger a couple of times. In this post I want to write about another of his ideas. His book The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self opens with the words "In this book, I will try to convince you that there is no such thing as a self" and as Buddhists we may immediately feel that this is familiar ground. However Metzinger is not a Buddhist, and sums up the Buddha as a pessimist who posited, "essentially, that life is not worth living". (Ego Tunnel, p.199) Of course I disagree with this summation - the Buddha wasn't a pessimist, and did not say this, although he did place limits on what kind of life is worth living.

In this post I want to look not at Metzinger's book, but at a talk he gave in 2005 as part of the Foerster Lectures on the Immortality of the Soul, (available on YouTube) entitled "Being No One" (also the title of a book) which explores the idea of a first person perspective.

Metzinger says that for there to be a first person perspective we need three 'target properties'

1. mineness - a sense of ownership, particularly over the body.
2. selfhood - the sense that "I am someone", and continuity through time.
3. centredness - the sense that "I am the centre of my own subjective self".

I'm not sure where he got these criteria, but after working on the Alagaddūpama Sutta recently I am struck by a parallel. Selfhood in the Pāli texts is often summarised in the phrase:

etaṃ mama, eso'haṃasmi, eso me attā.

this is mine, I am this, this is my self.

I suggest that:

etaṃ mama = this is mine = mineness.

eso'hamasmi = I am this = centredness.

eso me attā = this is my self = selfhood.

The order is different but the criteria are almost identical. I've recently argued that these are general observations, and not specifically connected with Brahmanical ideas about ātman with which the only minimally overlap.[1] Buddhists will hopefully be familiar with the traditional analytical approach to deconstructing these statements, so I can focus on Metzinger's approach.

Drawing on work by Antonio Damasio and Ronald Melzack, Metzinger proposes we replace the notion of a 'self' with a theoretical entity which he calls a Phenomenal Self Model. This is a representational system, created in the brain, the content of which is us, ourselves. "We" are in fact a simulation. We simulate and emulate ourselves for ourselves, and thereby create what we call consciousness. This model is rooted in our proprioceptive sense (the information derived from muscle tension, inner-ear and other bodily sensations) according to Melzack; and in our bodily systems (especially endocrine, blood and viscera) and emotions according to Damasio. These (probably both) generate a constant input which is modelled in the brain for the purposes of regulation and optimisation. This model is sub-personal, it is not a 'person' in our heads directing our actions (there is no homunculus as it used to be called). What we call our 'self' is in fact simply a representation of our bodily, and mental states, combined with a representation of representing (reflexive awareness).

However this model is transparent to us - we do not understand ourselves to be relating to a model of reality, we understand ourselves to be relating to reality. This is because the processes which generate the model are not available to introspection - they happen too fast, and too seamlessly for us to see them. There was a clear evolutionary advantage to having this ability to model reality and use that model to guide our actions; but there is no advantage in knowing that we are doing this - we see a danger and react, but to complicate things by seeing the picture of a danger in our head as a picture would only slow our reactions down, and we would not survive. For Metzinger the transparency of the Phenomenal Self Model is a strong limit that we cannot break through. It only becomes obvious through detailed analysis of what goes wrong with consciousness in specific brain injuries. We are all naive realists according to Metzinger, i.e we think we interact directly with reality, because that is how it feels. It is probably this naive realism that makes us resistant to reductive explanations of consciousness - whether Buddhist or scientific. The mechanisms of consciousness are not available to introspection, but we feel (want, assume) it to be something more than simple biological processes, and we are baffled by complexity generally so we think of consciousness as something rather magical. We may be wrong.

Metzinger's critique of the idea of a first-person perspective centres on the way that the Phenomenal Self Model can go wrong. In the case of "mineness" for example, we get cases where our thoughts do not seem to under our control, as in schizophrenia. In unilateral hemi-neglect a person may not recognise their limbs as their own. In alien hand syndrome one of the hands appears to act independently of our conscious will. Likewise some delusional people experience everything that happens as caused by their intention - Metzinger relates meeting a person who stood all day looking out the window making the sun move. In the rubber-hand experiment we find that an artificial hand can become included in our body image by confusing the physical and visual senses. Finally he cites the case of a woman born with no arms or legs who never-the-less has phantom limb sensations. Having never had limbs where could such phantoms come from if not the brain itself? The sense of mineness is actually prone to error in many ways which would not be possible if it actually reflected our bodies. The sense of ownership is generated within the Phenomenal Self Model, within the brain.

Similarly the sense of selfhood is prone to malfunction. Various disorders of the dissociative type show that what R. D. Laing called 'ontological security' is by no means assured, and some people experience a complete breakdown of their sense of being a self, while remaining conscious. Or we may, through delusion, wrongly identify ourselves as some other person.

The first person perspective also capable of being disrupted: in out of body experiences for instance (which Metzinger has vivid experience of); and in mystical experiences of oneness with the universe. Compare Jill Bolte Taylor's description of her stroke in which the left-hemisphere of her brain shut down. (TED) Taylor's description of the breakdown of the first person perspective is similar to the mystical experience sometimes called oceanic boundary loss that is described by mystics of many traditions. Note that Taylor lost all language, the ability to speak, memory of who she was, and the ability to walk, but she did not lose consciousness nor the ability to make intentions or memories. However Taylor associates "I am" with the left hemisphere of the brain which "shut down" during here stroke - she remained conscious and aware, but with no sense of "I am".

So Metzinger argues that all of this plasticity and bugginess [my choice of terms] in the three qualities tells us that they do not exist as such, but are elements of a simulation. Consciousness, self-consciousness is a virtual reality. He sums up the idea with an annotated statement about the process of cognition.

I myself [the content of the currently active transparent self model] am seeing this object [the content of the transparent object-representation] and I am seeing it right now [as an element within a virtual window of presence (i.e. working memory)] with my own eyes [the simple story about "direct" sensory perception, which suffices for the evolutionary purposes of the brain].

He says "of course you don't see with your eyes!" We see with our visual perception systems. But we cannot experience these systems working, we just experience seeing. In the final part of the lecture two questions emerge from the the title of the lecture series which concerns the question of "the immortality of the soul". The first is: is the self an illusion? "For the self to be an illusion," says Metzinger, "there would have to be someone whose illusion it was, and there is no one," thus: "if it is an illusion, it is no one's illusion". The second question relates to immortality, and to this idea he says: "strictly speaking nobody is ever born, and nobody ever dies". His phrasing perhaps suggests a Vedanta outlook (we know he meditates but not in what tradition).

Having begun with the familiar and traversed some unfamiliar territory, we find ourselves back on familiar ground with these last statements. It sounds a lot like Buddhism - from a non-Buddhist scientific philosopher. But note that Metzinger is saying that the process is transparent, that it is not available to introspection - he does not seem to allow for a radical change in consciousness like bodhi. In traditional Buddhist terms there is no possibility of direct contact with reality - this becomes a contradiction in terms because consciousness is only a simulation. In my own terms, which derive mainly from the writing of Sue Hamilton, he does not allow for access to the khandhas, the apparatus of experience: he allows for no insight into the creation of a first person perspective which might allow for liberation from it in a positive sense. I believe, to some extent I know, that in meditation the Self Model becomes opaque and available to introspection.

In The Ego Tunnel Metzinger explores some of the ethical and even spiritual implications of his theory, and here he says some very interesting and attractive things which I will try to write about at some point. For more on Metzinger's theory see the self-model page on Scholarpedia.

Notes

1. In making this claim I am consciously and explicitly contradicting both K. R. Norman and Richard Gombrich who see this particular phrase as a specific echo of the early Upaniṣads - Chāndogya in the case of Norman, and Bṛhadāranyaka for Gombrich. Part of my rebuttal is précised in the post Early Buddhists-and ātman/brahman - while the whole argument is set out in a longer but not quite finished essay. Suffice it to say, I do see a connection of a sort, but nothing to indicate that the Buddha had any direct contact with Upaniṣadic sages or was directly dealing with issues central to their texts. The papers I am thinking of are:
   • Gombrich, Richard. (1990) 'Recovering the Buddha’s Message.' The Buddhist Forum: Seminar Papers 1987-88. Ed. T. Skorupski, London, SOAS.
   • Norman, K. R. (1981) 'A note on attā in the Alagaddūpama-sutta.' Studies in Indian Philosophy (Memorial volume for Pandit Sukhlaji Sanghvi), Ahmedabad, pp. [Reprinted in Collected Papers, Oxford: Pali Text Society, 1991; vol. ii, p.200-209.]
   
   
   
   

image: homunculus Smashing Pumkins Album cover artwork.

The Apparatus of Experience

Sue Hamilton's book Early Buddhism a New Approach is not an easy read, but it is very rewarding. I found in it a doctrinal confirmation and clarification of my intuitions about the Dharma. I had been asking myself - what is it that arises in dependence on causes? (Jayarava Rave 8 April 2008) My answer had shifted from "things" to "experiences". This is reflected also in my translation of the Buddha's last words: "all experiences are disappointing..."

Central to Hamilton's book, and building on her earlier published work is a re-examination of the canonical references to the khandhas (Sanskrit skandha). These are typically described as encompassing the whole human being - there is nothing outside of the khandhas. Hamilton demonstrates that actually the khandhas are not meant to literally encompass the whole being, but do make up the minimum required apparatus for experience: hence "apparatus of experience". I like this little phrase and its implications very much.

A quick digression here to a suggestion by Prof. Gombrich about the translation of khandha - again from the Numata Lectures and appearing in his forthcoming "What the Buddha Thought". Khandha is most often translated by words such as aggregate, group or category, or (by Conze) as 'heap'. Gombrich points to the Pāli term aggikhandha meaning "a blazing mass". Khandha often occurs in the compound upādānakhandha where it is frequently translated as "aggregates of clinging". Gombrich links it to the extended fire metaphor used by the Buddha and suggests "blazing mass of fuel" (upādāna meaning literally fuel.) The khandhas, then, are a mass of fuel which, as the Fire Sermon ( Ādittapariyāya Sutta literally: The way of putting things as being on fire) tells us are on fire with the fires of greed, hatred and delusion.

The khandhas then are part of the mechanism keeping us in saṃsara, they are the "mass of fuel" that burns, and Nibbāna is the extinguishing of that fire - though the fuel itself can remain at this point as the term upādi-sesa-nibbāna "extinguishing with a remainder" suggests. It is rather a squeeze to fit every facit of the human being into just these five categories, and Hamilton manages to make a lot more sense of them as a kind of minimal requirement for experience - she takes the idea of nothing existing outside the khandhas as a metaphorical reference to the fact of experience: that everything we can know comes to us through the senses.

To have experience at all we must have a living body (rūpa). This is the vehicle for consciousness and the locus of experience. Without a living sensing body we would not receive sensory data - recall that the sense organ must be involved for contact to take place.

Having met with sensory data (vedanā) we process it: we become aware of and identify the sensation (saññā), we categorise it and name it (viññāṇā), and we respond affectively to it (saṅhkāra). This is a very cut down psychology, a minimalist account of consciousness, but it contains all that is necessary for continued experience, that is to say for continuation in samsara. And this is the process, this continuation in samsara which the Buddha constantly tells people is the focus of his teachings. Asked about all manner of metaphysical and philosophical teachings, the Buddha replies that he only teaches about the process of experience and how to end it.

Hamilton is saying, in effect, that later Buddhist tradition have taken this teaching a little to literally when they say things like: "These are the five aspects in which the Buddha has summed up all the physical and mental phenomena of existence". [Nyanatiloka : 98] Everything is not literally summed up, it is just that this is the necessary apparatus (to use Hamilton's terms) for all experience. All of experience - of whatever kind - is sensed, processed and acted upon through the khandhas. It is in this sense that the set is a complete description of the human being, not literally. It makes the assumption that we are what we experience, and as I have discovered, any attempt to get behind experience to confirm it involves some other sensory experience. One image that occurs to me for this is that we cannot get behind the mirror to see if anything is there because we always see a new mirror.

All this is not to say that some kind of objective world does not exist. I think the level of consensus that is possible on what is being experienced suggests very strongly that there is some kind of objective world. However I would argue that since we must always rely on our senses in any attempt to establish the status of the objective world, that such attempts are meaningless - they cannot provide a definitive answer one way or the other. I've come to believe that it was this that the Buddha was trying to get people to understand. Take for example the short Sabbaṃ Sutta in the Saṃyutta Nikāya. In this text the Buddha says that "the all" (sabbaṃ) is the eye and forms, the ear and sounds, the nose and smells, the tongue and tastes, the body and the felt, the mind and dhammas. (SN 35.23 = Bodhi : 1140). There is nothing outside of this "all". This is an explicit confirmation of what I've been saying. To take this to be an ontological statement - that outside of this "all" there is nothing - is to miss the point. It does not make sense as ontology, but as an epistemology it is very useful. All that we can know are 'objects' of the senses (including the mental sense), that is to say all we can know is what we experience - and the khandhas are the apparatus of experience.

I think this has profound implications for how we practice and teach the Dharma. For one thing I think we should abandon talking about dependent arising in terms of "things arising in dependence on causes" - there are no things only experiences. It would be more accurate to say that "experiences of things arise in dependence on causes". This then allows us to focus on the experience of dependent arising, rather than trying to locate some object which is arising. So many of our metaphors for dependent arising involve "things". But because of the way we function - through and only through experience - there are in effect no things arising.


References

• Bodhi. 2000. The connected discourses of the Buddha : a translation of the Saṃyutta Nikāya. Boston : Wisdom Publications.
  
• Hamilton, Sue. 2000. Early Buddhism : a new approach. The I of the beholder. Richmond, Surrey : Curzon.
• Nyanatiloka. 1980. Buddhist dictionary : manual of Buddhist terms and doctrines. (4th ed). Kandy, Sri Lanka : Buddhist Publication Society (2004 reprint).

image: JAKIMOWICZ Fabien - belfry clock mechanism