Hīnayāna reprise.

Abandoned Bicycle now defective
(a hīnayāna). Jayarava

I've mentioned my view that the pejorative term hīnayāna has intimations of caste prejudice to a few people and several have expressed doubts over my interpretation. In this essay I want to reprise my earlier, in fact my first ever, rave 'Don't mention the H word' with a closer eye on the philology of the world hīna and particularly how it is used in compounds. That previous essay was a bit reactionary and the argument not very sophisticated. The argument here is more rigorous and searching. I will follow this with a brief look at how the word is used in the context of Saddharmapuṇḍarika or White Lotus Sūtra.

Hīna is a past-participle from the verbal root of the 3rd class: √hā - which forms stems by reduplication. "hahā" is disallowed, so the reduplicated 'ha' becomes 'ja'. The 3rd person singular present is jahati or jahāti (in both Pāli and Sanskrit) - the rules for reduplication apparently leaving room for ambiguity. The basic meaning is 'to leave, desert, abandon, renounce, forsake'. The past-participle then means 'abandoned, deserted, forsaken.' In practice it also means 'to fall short of, be deficient, or defective'.

Roots in 'h' are often abbreviated from gha and PED suggests a comparison with an Indo-European root *ghē from which we get the Greek words khēros (void), khēra (widow), khora (open space), and khorizo (separate). Compare this with the word kha in Sanskrit which means a space, or aperture; and it seems likely that words 'hole' and 'hollow' from this same root. It is from kha in the sense of 'the hole in the wheel through which the axle goes', that we get the two important terms sukha and duḥkha: the metaphor is a contrast between smoothly (su 'good, well') running cart' and one which gives a lumpy uncomfortable (dus) ride.

Monier-Williams gives more than two dozen compounds using this word. About half of them relate to social grade, or a social role; while the other half relate to something which is defective or absent. In the first category we have hīnakula and °kuṣṭa (low status family), °ja/jati/yoni (low birth), and °varga/varṇa which specifically refer to the śudra caste.

The second category we find °karman/kriya/kratu (someone who neglects the sacrifice), °guṇa/carita/vṛtta (of inferior virtue, base conduct) both of these clusters reflect the Brahminical prejudice against non-Brahmins who did not participate in their sacrificial religion. Another term for a non-believer was hīnapratijña (faithless). A drama with an anti-hero is hīnanāyaka ('whose leader is corrupt'). Finally those who associate with inferiors might be described as °sakhya (friends of the low people) or °seva (an attendant on low people).

The third category refers to something which is missing or defective: hīnakosa (empty treasury), °cakṣu/darsana-sāmarthya (blind), °bala (feeble), °buddhi (stupid), °rūpa (ugly), °roman (bald), hīnaṇga (crippled), hīnāṃsu (dark [an insult in the Brahmin lexicon]); °dagdha (insufficiently burned), °pakṣa (unprotected), °mūtya (a low price), °vāda (defective statement, contradictory evidence), °vyañjana (indistinct consonants), °svara (discordant or silent), hīnārtha (fallen short of his goals, [opposite of siddhartha]). Used abstractly we find: °tva (defectiveness), hīnātirikta (defective), hīnādhika (too few, too much, i.e. the wrong amount), °krama (in diminishing order), °tara (worse, worst).

On this basis of this survey I must temper my statement about hīnayāna and caste. However since there are several related terms which clearly are caste related, we can say that a connotation of caste prejudice cannot be ruled out. Clearly none of the other compounds with hīna as a first member have a positive connotation, and most are related to ways in which people or things fail to live up to (especially Brahmanical) ideals.

The compound mahāyāna is clearly a karmadhāraya compound meaning 'big or great vehicle'; so we could expect hīnayāna to be intended as the same type of compound. From this point of view it would mean 'defective vehicle'. However hīnayana could also be read as a tatpuruṣa - 'vehicle of the defective', or 'vehicle of the abandoned'. Read as a bahuvrīhi we could take is referring to someone who has 'abandoned the way'. Clearly English translators have fudged this term by translating it as "lesser" vehicle, but to be fair it is likely that they were following the influential translator Kumārajīva, who rendered hīnayāna into Chinese as 小乘 'hsiao-sheng, little vehicle'. (See Nattier p.172, n.4). Kumārajīva's translation of the Lotus Sūtra (for instance) is the preferred translation, and except for Kern's translation from the Sanskrit, all of the English translations are from Kumārajīva's Chinese translation (despite there being later, arguably better, Chinese translations).

The Saddharmapuṇḍarika Sūtra (SP) is a locus classicus for the use of 'hīnayāna' as a pejorative. In chapter two after the Buddha announces that he will give a new teaching, a new yāna, a group of 5000 men and women, monks and lay leave before the sermon is delivered. After which the Buddha says to Śāriputra (taking my examples from the verse section):

śuddhā ca niṣpalāvā ca susthitā pariṣanmama|
phalguvyapagatā sarvā sārā ceyaṁ pratiṣṭhitā||41|| 

Pure and free of chaff, my assembly is well established
The worthless have retreated and all the strong are steadfast

Hīnayāna does not seem to apply to the people themselves, though they are 'chaff' and 'worthless'. Curiously the text seems to use the term hīnayāna quite vaguely. Later in Chapter 2 the Buddha says:

ekaṁ hi kāryaṁ dvitiyaṁ na vidyate
na hīnayānena nayanti buddhāḥ ||55|| 

There is only one method, not a second,
The Buddhas do not lead by a defective way.

I think the definite article would be out of place here - it is 'a' not 'the' defective way. If we were to use the definite article it would imply that "the hīnayāna" was not something taught by the Buddha, and this would contradict everything we know about the history of Buddhism. Two verses on, the Buddha continues:

yadi hīnayānasmi pratiṣṭhapeya-
mekaṁ pi sattvaṁ na mamate sādhu||57|| 

It would not be good if even one being
Were to become established in a defective vehicle.

Again my sense here is of 'a defective vehicle', not 'the defective vehicle'. And actually it's not that clear what is being criticised here. It is curious and not at all what I expected to find, but this essay is already quite long, so I will have to explore it more at a later date. I will mention that SP uses the term hīnābhirata which Kern translates as 'low dispositions'. Abhirata means pleased or satisfied, as well as practising. There's every chance that hīnābhirata means 'dissatisfied' or 'lacking contentment' here. There is one other mention of a 'defective way' in chapter 6, but it doesn't add much to the picture. It almost seems as though the association of the people who leave the assembly and the 'defective way' is accidental. I don't see a direct connection between them in the key chapter. I'm reminded of the accidental identification of Lucifer ('the light bearer', an epithet of Nebuchadnezzar) with the Christian Devil based on a misreading of Isaiah 14:12 by Origen.

The argument over a suitable replacement term continues with some (me) using "Early Buddhism"; some opting for "Pāli Buddhism" (since the best known texts are in Pāli); and some "Mainstream Buddhism". All of these are problematic for a variety of reasons. My current favourite comes from Wikipedia and is "pre-sectarian". I'm going to adopt this and suggest other people do as well - it avoids the temporal problems (unlike "early"), it is neutral (unlike Pāli and Hīnayāna), it is a fair description of the subject (unlike "mainstream").

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Vaidya, P. L. Saddharmapuṇḍarīkasūtram. The Mithila Institute of Post-Graduate Studies and Research in Sanskrit Learning, 1960. Online: Digital Sanskrit Buddhist Canon. 

Kern, H. Saddharma-pundarika or The Lotus of the True Law. 1884. Sacred Books of the East, Vol XXI. Online: Internet Sacred Text Archive. 

Nattier, Jan. A few Good Men: The Bodhisattva Path According to the Inquiry of Ugra (Ugraparipṛcchā). University of Hawai'i Press, 2003.

Extra Notes 

10 Oct 2010: In the Alagaddūpama Sutta, hīnaṃ 'rejected' is contrasted with paṇītaṃ 'exalted'.

3 Aug 2014. Dhammapada, Chapter 13, vs 167

hīnaṃ dhammaṃ na seveyya pamādena na saṃvase
micchādiṭṭhiṃ na seveyya na sīya lokavaddhano 

Don't associate with a defective teaching,
Don't dwell heedlessly,
Don't embrace wrong views,
Don't indulge the world.

hīnaṃ dhammaṃ - a defective teaching. 

24 Jan 2015. In Pāḷi there is a phrase hīnāya āvattati meaning "to go back to 'the low' [way of life]" (Vin I.17, MN I.460, SN II.231, IV.191) or in the past-tense hīnāyāvatta (MN I.460, SN II.50). The phrase is used to refer to someone who has abandoned being a bhikkhu and gone back to being a householder.

5 Jul 2015. See also Anālayo (2014) The Hīnayāna Fallacy. JOCBS. 6: 9-31.

Philology of Dependent Arising

‘Dependent Arising’, ‘Dependent Origination’, ‘Interdependent Arising’, ‘Conditioned Co-production’ – these are all synonyms (almost always capitalised) for the sine qua non of Buddhist doctrines and technical jargon. In Sanskrit the word is pratītyasamutpāda, and in Pāli paṭiccasamuppāda. We also have the related past-participle pratītyasamutpanna (paṭiccasamuppannna) ‘dependently arisen’. The word is a usually treated as a compound which is clearly reflected in the English translations. In this short essay I want to unpick and unpack these words; in technical jargon we’ll do a morphological and semantic analysis. I’ll work in Sanskrit and add Pāli equivalents in parentheses since the morphology is more obvious in Sanskrit, though my main interest is how the word is used in Pāli.


Pratītya

Pratītya (paṭicca) is a gerund or absolutive, a verbal form indicating an action occurring before the action of the main verb. [1] The form of the gerund for verbs with prefixes is different from verbs without prefixes, and probably originated in Indo-European as an instrumental singular of a verbal noun in -i, which form instrumentals by substituting -i with -yā. [2] The verb in this case is pratyeti (pacceti) which we can analyse as prati + √i. The root √i 'to go' is related to the Latin eo, [3] and the cognate is only rarely found in English words like ‘iterate’ (meaning ‘to go again’). The form pratītya is regular and arises out of some sandhi changes along the way. √i is a second class verb in Sanskrit (first class in Pāli) that undergoes guṇa (strengthening) and forms a stem by adding the vowel ‘a’. The guṇa grade of i is e. Sandhi rules say that e + a > e, [4] and we’re left with a stem e- The 3rd person plural is eti. When we add the prefix prati- there is another sandhi change i + e > ye: so the final stem is pratye-; 3rd person singular pratyeti. When this devolves to Pāli we get some phonetic changes in the conjunct consonants: pra > pa; tye > cce: this gives us pacceti.

The root √i ‘to go’ is the same in Pāli and Sanskrit. The suffix prati- (paṭi-) gives a sense of towards, near; or opposition. Prati-√i, then, should mean something like ‘go towards, go near, go back’. The affect of combining a prefix and a root is not always predictable from the parts but this is what we get more or less: patyeti means ‘to come on to or back to, to fall back on’, as well as ‘to go towards, go to meet’.

To form the gerund in the case of a verb with a prefix, in both Pāli and Sanskrit, one adds a suffix -ya to the weakest grade of the root (simply ‘i’ in the case of √i), or in this case because the stem vowel is short: -tya. [5] So we get prati + i + tya. Sandhi applies here so i + i > ī giving pratītya. In Pāli pra > pa, tya > cca, and we find that tī > ṭi (with retroflexion of the consonant, and shortening of the vowel). [6] The meaning of the gerund should be something like ‘having come to, having fallen back on’ but in application it means more like ‘grounded on, on account of’.

One very common form of use for paṭicca in Pāli Buddhist texts is in the twelve-fold formula of paṭiccasamuppāda which is sometimes written like this:

avijjāpaccaya paṭicca saṅkhārā...
grounded on unknowing as a condition, there are the processes...

Samutpāda

Samutpāda (samuppāda) is a verbal noun from a root with two prefixes: saṃ + ud + pāda. The root is √pad which primarily means ‘to go, to walk’ (but also ‘to fall’). The prefix ud- ‘up, upwards’ becomes ut- with the unvoiced ‘p’ of √pad to give the present stem utpada- ‘to arise, originate, come forth, be produced’. From this we get the past-participle, utpanna (uppanna) ‘arisen, originated’. The causative form of the verb has the stem utpādaya (with the addition of ‘-ya-’ and the lengthening of the root vowel) meaning ‘to produce, beget, generate’. There’s not a great deal of difference between here the indicative and the causative - the difference between ‘to arise’, and ‘to produce’. From utpādaya- we get the verbal noun utpāda (uppāda) ‘coming forth, birth, production, arising’. And in Pāli the tpā conjunct devolves to ppā. Perhaps, given that utpāda seems to derive from the causative, we should favour translations which retain that flavour – ‘arising’ is something that just happens, whereas if something is ‘produced’ we get the sense of a definite process causing the arising.

The suffix sam- gives the sense of ‘completed’ or ‘together’ (it is cognate with the English suffix ‘com-’). The word samutpāda (samuppāda) means ‘appearing with, arising together’. It is only infrequently used as a stand-alone word in Pāli. [7]


Pratītya-samutpāda

The two parts (pratītya and samutpāda) are usually understood as forming a compound, and should therefore be written as one word pratītyasamutpāda, though we often find it written with a hyphen for readability: pratītya-samutpāda. The last thing is to discuss what type of compound they form, and the relationship between the two parts. In fact it is unusual to find a compound with gerund as the first member. This type of compound where one part retains the syntactical form it would have in a non-compounded sentence is called a ‘syntactical compound’. [8] Philologists suggest that this type of compound was originally a gerund and verb form which has become lexicalised. [9] We do find this kind of construction with the verb utpadyate (uppajjati) in the Pāli phrase: paccayaṃ paṭicca uppajjati - (‘arising in dependence on a condition’). [10]

In the case of pratītya-samutpāda the compound is formed from the gerund and the verb as a past-participle or verbal noun. Because the words retain their syntactical relationship, i.e. ‘having depended [on a condition] it is produced’, we do not need to analyse them in terms of the nominal compound paradigms. If we did do such an analysis we could take the gerund in its archaic the sense as an instrumental, and treat the compound as an instrumental tatpuruṣa meaning ‘produced through depending on’.


Conclusions

We’ve now looked at each of the separate elements – (prati+√i+tya) + (saṃ+ud+√pad) - and how they go together (morphology); and we’ve looked at how the individual parts contribute to the meaning (semantics). However it is not enough to know the etymology in order to understand a word. We have to look at how it is used in context. Even then we must accept that we have only an imperfect understanding since in the case of Buddhist texts we are far removed in time and culture from the authors or composers. Not being a native speaker of a language means we never really have the same facility as someone who is. When we hear a foreigner speaking our mother tongue we almost always hear words being used incorrectly, idioms being misunderstood, sentences oddly constructed. We need to keep this in mind when reading a Sanskrit or Pāli text, even when we think we understand the words. Back in 1966 the Dutch philologist Jan Gonda wrote a 165 page essay on the uses of the single word ‘loka’ in Vedic literature in which he suggests that the most common translation – ‘world’ – is actually the least likely to apply in any given situation.

By far the most common use of our term is with reference to the twelvefold nidāna chain. The links in the chain are called ‘dependently arisen elements’; in Pāli ‘paṭicca-samuppanne dhamme’. [11] And the whole system of one thing arising with the previous one as a condition (paccaya) is known as ‘dependent arising’ – paṭiccasamuppāda.

We can see how the English Translations get at the meaning, but only as long as we already know what is being said. The phrase ‘dependent arising’ is probably now the most popular translation of pratītya-samutpāda but it does not communicate very much to the uninitiated. Even if we choose a more descriptive translation such as Conze’s ‘conditioned co-production’ this isn’t much help. In any case the form of the syntactical compound tells us that pratītya-samutpāda is a short-hand way of referring to a longer description: ‘the process by which something is produced because the necessary conditions for its production are in place’. Even then it leaves many questions: what type of ‘something’ we are referring to? Does the formula constitute a general theory of causation, or only apply to the production of mental states? To this extent Buddhism is esoteric and much of our jargon is opaque to outsiders.


Bibliography

• Coulson, Michael. 2003. Sanskrit. 2^nd Ed. Teach Yourself Books.
• Gonda, J. 1966. Loka : World and heaven in the Veda. Amsterdam, Noord-Hollandsche U.M.
• Hamp. Eric P.1986. ‘On the Morphology of Indic Gerunds.’ Indo-Iranian Journal 29 (2), p.103-107
• Macdonell. A.A. 1926. A Sanskrit Grammar for Students. 3rd Ed. D.K. Printworld (2008)
• Norman, K.R. (trans.) 2001. The Group of Discourses (Sutta-Nipāta). 2nd. Ed. Pali Text Society
• Norman, K. R. 1991. ‘Syntatical Compounds in Middle Indo-Aryan’ in Middle Indo-Aryan and Jaina Studies, Leiden, p.3-9. Also in Collected Papers, 1990-2001, Vol.4, p.218-25.
• Whitney, William Dwight. 1885. The Roots, Verb Forms and Primary Derivatives of the Sanskrit Language. Motilal Banarsidass. (2006 printing)
Plus a range of Pāli, Sanskrit, and English dictionaries and other reference works both printed and online

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Notes

[1] The gerund is used extensively in Buddhist texts. We might read for instance that someone approaches the Buddha, and having approached the Buddha, they salute him; and having saluted him, they sit off to one side; and having sat off to one side they respectfully asked a question. The Gerundsindicated here in italics – in English they are usually rendered as a perfect participle (having approached), or as a present participle (approaching).

[2] Authorities are divided on the origins of the gerund in –tvā, though seem to agree on it being an instrumental singular of a verbal noun. See Coulson Sanskrit, p.67, Macdonell 163 (p.137-8) derive it from a verbal noun in -tu; and for a dissenting view Hamp On the Morphology of Indic Gerunds who argues that –tvā must derive from a verbal noun in –tva, especially as nouns in –tu usually require guṇa and we don’t see this in gerunds.

[3] Fans of Monty Python's Life of Brian will recall that Brian misuses the verb eo in his slogan 'romanes eunt domus' and is forced to conjugate the verb while having his ear twisted by the centurion. He is looking for the third person plural imperative ite - 'romani ite domum'.

[4] If we have for instance ete aśvāḥ (these horses) we would write it ete śvāḥ or we can use an apostrophe to indicate the missing letter ete 'śvāḥ; in Devanāgarī we might use the avagrāha एतेऽश्वाः

[5] The addition of -t- for roots with short vowels is regular: cf Macdonell A Sanskrit Grammar for Students. 182.a (pg.160).

[6] Sanskrit prati- can become either pati- or paṭi- and it's not clear in each case why. Maybe due to the influence of different dialects?

[7] E.g. Vin i.96, S v.374, A iii.405, A v.201.

[8] K.R. Norman has adopted this term coined by G.V. Davane in 1956. They are also called ‘unregelmässige’ (irregular) by J. Wackkernagel, and ‘anomalous’ by Whitney – see Norman 'Syntactical Compounds', (in collected papers) p.218.

[9] See note 72 in Norman The Group of Discourses, p.175; and Norman 'Syntactical Compounds'. I'm grateful to Dhīvan Thomas Jones for pointing out Norman's note in the Sutta Nipāta.

[10] M i.259. This appears to be the only occurrence of this phrase in the Pali Canon. The shorter phrase, paṭicca uppajjati, occurs a number of times throughout the nikāyas. I cannot find the obvious precursor: paṭicca samuppajjati.The Verb samuppajja- appears to occur only once in the Nikāyas at SN 36:12 (PTS S iv.219) in verses which accompany prose using uppajja-.

[11] See especially The Discourse on Conditions Paccayasuttaṃ (SN 12:20 PTS S ii.25-27)

My thanks to Dr Vincenzo Vergiani for pointing out several errors in a draft of this essay, all remaining errors are mine.


image: MarenYumi. Flickr, Creative Commons licence.