The Rhinoceros Sutta in Three Parallel Versions

My friend Dharmacārin Dhīvan (aka Dr Thomas Jones) was recently invited to give a series of lectures at Cambridge University and he told me that he included three parallel versions of the Rhinoceros Sutta partly to demonstrate the relationship of the canonical languages, but mostly to give a feel for the early (i.e. pre-sectarian) Buddhist world. I was taken by the idea of presenting three versions of the same text and so I asked for a copy of his handout and have used it to create this blog post. These three versions of the text can be found together in Richard Salomon's book A Gāndhārī Version of the Rhinoceros Sūtra.

Pāli (Sn v. 36, 53, 73) nāgo va yūthāni vivajjayitvā sañjātakhandho padumī uḷāro, yathābhirantaṃ vihare araññe eko care khaggavisāṇakappo. saṃsaggajātassa bhavati sneho snehanvayaṃ dukkham idam pahoti ādīnavaṃ snehajaṃ pekkhamāno eko care khaggavisāṇakappo mettaṃ upekhaṃ karuṇaṃ vimuttiṃ āsevamāno muditañ ca kāle sabbena lokena avirujjhamāno eko care khaggavisāṇakappo

Gāndhārī: Kharoṣṭi mss ṇāgo vi yusaṇi vivajaita saṃjadakaṃdho patumaṃ uraḍo +++++vi+[ṛ]+++ +++++++++++ sa(*ṃ)s(*evamaṇasa siyati sneho) s̄eha(*ṃ)vayaṃ dukha(*ṃ=idaṃ prabhoti) +++++++++++ (*eko care khargaviṣaṇagapo) metra uvekha karuṇa ya bhavae asevamaṇa mutita e kalo (*sarveṇa loge)ṇa a(*virujama)ṇa eko care khargavi(*ṣaṇagapo)

Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit: Mahāvastu [no equivalent for this verse] saṃsevamānasya siyātisneho snehānvayaṃ dukham idaṃ prabhoti saṃsevamānaṃ tu jugupsamāno eko care khaḍgaviṣāṇakalpo …upekṣāṃ karuṇāṃ ca bhāvya āsevamāno muditāṃ ca kāle maitreṇa cittena hitānukaṃpī eko care khaḍgaviṣāṇakalpo

(+ indicates an unreadable character on the manuscript; * is a conjectured reading;)

Dhīvan also provided his students with an English translation of the Pāli (based on K.R. Norman's):

As an elephant with massive shoulder, spotted, noble, leaving the herds might live as it pleases in the forest, one should wander alone like a rhinoceros (horn).

Affection comes into being from keeping company; following on affection, this suffering arises. Seeing the danger that comes from affection, one should wander alone like a rhinoceros (horn).

Cultivating at the right time love, equanimity, compassion, liberation and gladness, unimpeded by the whole world, one should wander alone like a rhinoceros (horn).

The three versions of this text are in three important languages for the transmission of Early Buddhist texts. It is interesting to see these languages side by side. It's doubtful to me whether they would have been mutually intelligible. Unlike the Vedas which were rigidly transmitted in a single language that gradually became unintelligible too many of those involved in the transmission, the Buddha encouraged his followers to pass on the Dharma each in their own language.

We know that even among speakers of languages descended from Vedic that there must have been considerable linguistic variation. Compare the situation in Europe where we have languages such as Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, and Romanian all descended from vernacular Latin. It was some time before Sanskrit was a adopted as a lingua franca, not for many centuries. Some scholars think that Pali might have been an attempt at a lingua franca.

As well is the evidence of texts in several Indian languages, there are two stories in the Pali Canon which tell us that this was more than just a drifting apart. One of these, Vin ii.139, is now somewhat infamous because of the competing interpretations of it. In this story to Brahmins attempt to persuade the Buddha to allow them to translate the Buddha's teaching into 'chandaso' The competition arises because scholars have attempted to use this passage to show what language the Buddha might have spoken, by interpreting the word chandaso in at least three different ways. My understanding is that all we can draw from this passage is the notion that the Buddha did not want everything standardised linguistically.

The other story is found in the Araṇavibhanga Sutta (MN 139). Here the Buddha explicitly says that one should not insist on using the local dialect, nor override local usage. he points out that the same vessel is called different things in different places: pāti, patta, vittha, serāva, dhāropa, poṇa, pisīla (ie the Buddha in this text possibly knows of at least seven distinct dialects). The text is an instruction on how to avoid conflict, and in this case it doesn't really matter what we call the thing we are eating from as long as it does the job it's designed for.

So although we preserve scriptures in a relatively small number of languages, as English-speaking Buddhists what we strive for is to convey the Buddha's insight, and our own to the extent that we have it, in the language of the people we are speaking to. Clearly I believe that having reference to the traditional canons is helpful. I have certainly found that learning Pāli, even to the limited extent to which I have, has enriched my practice.

One of the consequences of this translation process is that not only is the language translated, by which I mean the words; but the cultural references also change. So the Buddhism of any given culture gradually becomes distinctive as it orientates itself to that culture. This gives rise to differences that aren't necessarily easy to understand and doctrinally terms. If we only use doctrine as a frame of reference for understanding Buddhism then we may fail to understand the way that some Buddhists practice. This opens up the wider question which I hope to address in the future essay: who is a Buddhist? What is Buddhism? Specifically is Buddhism not simply what Buddhists say and do; or is Buddhism only what it says ancient texts?

~~oOo~~

Salomon, Richard with Glass, Andrew. A Gandhari Version of the Rhinoceros Sutra: British Library Kharosthi Fragment 5B. University of Washington Press, 2001.

Addition 20 May 2010. If you are interested in parallel versions of texts then there is a Comparative version of the Dhammapada compiled by Bhikkhu Anandajyoti. He compares four main texts: the Pāli Dhammapada, the Gāndārī Dhammapada, the Patna Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Dharmapada, and a Sanskrit text Dhammapada style text called Udanavarga. In addition he includes parallel verses from other texts where they are known about.

7 March 2015. Dhivan has subsequently published an article on the difficult term khaggavisāṇa: 'Like the Rhinoceros, or Like Its Horn? The Problem of Khaggavisāṇa Revisited.' Buddhist Studies Review. Vol 31, No 2 (2014). 

The Stream of Life

I was reading through Rune Johansson's Pāli Buddhist Texts and came across this little verse [1].

accayanti ahorattā
jīvatam uparujjhati
āyu khīyati maccānam
kunnadīnam va odakaṃ

Days and nights elapse
Vitality declines
Mortal life is exhausted
Like water in streams

We are used to using rivers as metaphors. We understand the idea of the ever changing stream of the river, flowing from head waters to the sea, especially if we come from moist temperate climates. But in North India there is another phenomena which may not be so familiar.

In Feb 2009 I was in Bodhgaya for the convention of the Triratna Buddhist Order. One day I took the time to walk a little out of town to cross the long bridge over the River Falgu (called the Nirañjana in the Buddha's day) to the little village of Senani (also called Sujata in association with the young women who is said to have offered the Bodhisatta some milk-rice after he gave up self-torture). In Senani the farmers still pull a wooden plough behind bullocks despite the fact the iron age began about three millennia ago and resulted in the original clearing of this land. However the fields looked green and productive on this side of the river, where there was only brown dry fields around Bodhgaya. On the edge of the village is a stūpa which was built to commemorate Sujata.

The accompanying image from Google earth [2] shows Bodhgaya and the Falgu/Narañjana, the Mahabodhi Temple complex, the bridge and Suajata's stūpa. Although the bridge is about 600 meters wide, as I walked accompanied by one of the ubiquitous 'school children' [3] of Bodhgaya, I saw only sand. The mighty river had completely dried up, and this was not even the hot season, this was during the coolish winter. This is what this image shows - the brown colour is sand, not water. At higher magnifications one can see the patterns and cart tracks in the sand, as well as the little hut next to the bridge that Śaiva sadhus occupy when it is dry. Pulling back even more one sees that the river peters out in both directions, though I think it probably forms a tributary of the Ganges during the monsoon. There is even a word for this phenomena in Sanskrit: vārṣikodaka 'having water only during the rainy season [varṣa]'.

Certainly I am not used to such contrasts. It occurred to me that the verse above had to be understood in this context - this cyclic flooding and then complete drying up of even substantial rivers. I could not have imagined life becoming exhausted like a small stream because I've (more or less) always lived on islands with abundant rainfall all year round. But in this region when even a large river can completely dry up, what chance does a small stream have? And the verse is saying that life is like a small stream in this region - it may flood, but soon is will disappear. The verse is much more compelling when seen in this context.

The use of the word jīvata is interesting. It begins as a past-participle of jīvati and therefore means 'lived', but comes to mean the life-span, or 'vitality' (itself from Latin vita 'life' and probably cognate with jīvata). The noun jīva is an important technical term in Jainism where it denotes a kind of soul which moves from life to life. The verse makes a contrast by choosing another word for life: ayu (Sanskrit āyus). We find this word in āyurveda which means something like the 'knowledge of life' i.e. a literal rending in English would be biology (though they do not quite mean the same thing!). Āyus is related to the Greek word æon, and to English 'eternal, always'. So buried in the history of these words is the notion of eternity, the belief or wish that life will go on and on.

The Canon records that these words were spoken to Māra in the Squirrel Sanctuary near Rājagaha in the heart land of the samaṇa movement. I've noted before that Johannes Bronkhorst has argued that the idea of rebirth came from this region from amongst the samaṇa groups of whom the Jains were pre-eminent in the Buddha's time [Rethinking Indian History]. Māra here argues that the jīvata rolls along like the chariot's wheel, he literally denies that days and nights pass and that life ends. The verse above is the Buddha's rely. The status of Māra is a long story - was he 'real', allegorical, metaphorical? One way we could take this story is as a psychodrama with Māra representing that part of our psyche which coined these words for life which has 'eternal' as a connotation. Māra is our refusal to face up to our own impending death. The refusal to face death is quite a common theme and I have dealth with it at least once before in my essay: From the Beloved.

However we read the verses I find it very helpful to have walked in that landscape when trying to get into the mindset I find in the Pāli texts.


References

1. The reference is Saṃyutta Nikāya i.109 - pg 201-202 of the single vol ed. of Bhikkhu Bodhi's translation. [I'm tempted to offer a prize for anyone who knows what a 'felly' is without looking it up!]
   
2. If you want a closer look at Bodhgaya on Google then the coordinates are: Latitude: N 24° 41.75, Longitude: E 84° 59.49
   
3. The 'students' scam money out of tourists and pilgrims by asking them to buy school books for them, which they immediately sell back to the shop. This scam has a second level in which the dupe is invited to visit the school where the headmaster informs them that the child is out of school because they haven't paid their fees, which the generous dupe pays for them - 0nly to see them on the street again the next day. (It happened to a friend of mine!)