Philogical Odds & Ends VII - Mind Words

Many words have interesting stories associated with them. This is a seventh set of terms which have caught my eye as having some interest, but which did not rate a whole post on their own. There is a list of other terms I've written about at the bottom of this post.

I've resisted this one for while because it's a tangle. Buddhist terminology for the mind is complex, and changes over time, so delineating what a particular word means is fraught. In fact understanding context is vital in the early Buddhist texts where words like citta, manas, and vijñāna start out as simple synonyms, but diverge and settle down into distinct terms. And all before the canon was closed! So I'll outline my understanding of these settled meanings, with two caveats: 1. one must always look closely at the context, and 2. I may have misunderstood them! These words stem from three main roots so I'll deal with them in groups.

CIT

The root √cit is defined in the dictionary as "knowing; thought , intellect , spirit , soul", but also "to perceive , fix the mind upon , attend to , be attentive , observe , take notice of"; and "to aim at , intend , design; to be anxious about , care for; to resolve". So √cit concerns what catches and holds our attention on the one hand, and what we move towards on the other; or, what is on our minds, and what motivates us (emotions are what 'set us in motion'; emotion comes from an old French word emouvoir meaning to 'stir up'; ultimately from Latin from ex- 'out' + movere 'to move'). And it can just be 'the mind'.

BTW I've noticed a tendency for famous translators to give verbs from √cit an 'intending' sense even when a 'thinking about' sense would seem more natural. I think they are trying to reinforce or conform to the idea that Buddhist morality depends on intention (cetanā).

One of the most common words from this root is citta. Generally speaking citta often just means 'the mind', but more specifically citta is 'thoughts'. We do have a problem finding English terms to correspond with this because in the Indian conception emotions are simply another kind of mental activity. Interestingly scientists are beginning to see emotions in this way also. Generally speaking emotion is a combination of generic physiological arousal (involving for example increased heart rate, alertness, and 'readiness'), along with thoughts which give the feelings their emotional 'colour', by telling us why we are aroused.

Citta is often translated as 'heart'. I would say that this translation reflects the Romantic trend in Western Buddhism which places a high value on inner experience, subjectivity, and especially the emotions. (Romanticism is a reaction against the rationalism of the early European Enlightenment which tended to see the world in rather mechanical terms). I don't think this is helpful as the Romantic ideology doesn't reflect the Indian idea any better than, say, scientific rationalism. Note that 'heart' is hṛdaya in Sanskrit, and hadaya in Pāli, and it has the same dual reference as in English: the cardiac organ, and the seat of the emotions. If a Sanskrit or Pali speaker meant 'heart', they had a perfectly good word for it; and, if we translate citta as 'heart', then how do we translate hṛdaya? [My friend Maitiu has written to me to suggest: " the translation of citta by heart might also be influenced by 心 xīn 'heart' being its most common translation in Chinese". Good point!] Update. Tibetan's translate citta with སེམས (sem). This can be traced back to a proto-Sino-Tibetan root *siǝm. And this is cognate with Chinese 心 xīn.

Cetas is the faculty which carries out thinking, i.e. 'the mind'. As such it is like manas (see below). Comments about 'the heart' apply to this word as well.

Cetanā means 'intention, will, volition'. It is the (e)motive aspect of thinking, the thing that sets us in motion. Hence, perhaps, the Buddha equates kamma and cetanā. In some texts (e.g. S iii.60) the confusing term saṅkhāra is explained as six types of cetanā associated with the six sense faculties.

MAN

The root √man ‘to think, believe’ evolved from the PIE root *√men also gave rise to Greek meno 'mood, anger'; Latin mēns 'mind, understanding, reason' in turn evolves into the English words mind, mental, and remind. Greek manthánein 'learn' gives us mathematics (originally ‘something to be learned’ ). PIE includes the sense 'memory', but this is lost in Sanskrit where words for memory are typically from √smṛ (e.g. smṛti) and √dhṛ (e.g. dhara).

The dictionary defines manas as "mind in the widest sense: thinking, thought, intellect, understanding, sense, conscience". Manas in Buddhism is primarily the function which processes the mental sense objects (dhammā) and the mental representations of the five physical senses.

Mati an abstract noun meaning 'mind', i.e. the manas faculty.

JÑĀ

Root √jñā 'to know' can be used as a standalone noun as well i.e. jñā 'knowledge'. It evolved from PIE *√gnō (with many variant spellings) which gives us the Greek gnosis and Latin cognitus > English cognition and recognise. French variations on Latin cognōscent (present participle) give us connoisseur, cognisance, and reconnaissance. From the Latin nōbilis we get the English noble which originally meant ‘(well) known’. Other cognates are note, notorious and (interestingly) quaint.

Jñāna (Pāli ñāṇa) "knowledge, knowing, wisdom."

Vijñāna (Pāli viññāna) vi- prefix to indicate 'dispersal' or 'division' (it can also indicate an opposite and function as an intensifier). Generally translated as 'consciousness', but not quite synonymous with the English word. The Buddhist term refers to what arises when there is a sense faculty interacting with a sense object. What we call consciousness would include the receptive aspect of consciousness waiting for input, or functioning independent of input. The Buddhist idea is that consciousness is always consciousness of something, and makes the internal mental world a 'sense' like the five physical senses.

Saṃjñā (Pāli saññā) saṃ- + jñā. The prefix saṃ- usually has the sense of completeness or togetherness. Saṃjñā is used in the particular sense 'apperception', perception combined with recognition; but also used as a synonym for viññāna in some texts (e.g. SN 45.11 and 45.12: Communicating the Dhamma).

Prajñā (Pali paññā) The prefix pra- has several sense but probably here means 'much' rather than 'before' (c.f. Latin prognosis). In Buddhism it is virtually synonymous with vipaśyanā (Pali vipassanā) or 'seeing through'.

Recently I've been studying the Kālāma Sutta and this word viññu (Sanskrit vijña) comes up. One of the moral criteria is to avoid doing things offensive to the viññu. This is often translated as 'the wise' but this is deceptive. There is an apparent conflict because the Buddha has already told the Kālāmas 'don't [decide, thinking] we respect the religious teacher' (mā samaṇo no garūti). However the viññu and the samaṇa aren't necessarily the same, and it doesn't refer to the arahants either. The word viññu just means 'intelligent, knowledgeable, or well informed' and 'wise' is probably a poor choice.

So amongst the main terms for 'consciousness', broadly speaking: manas is the mental sense faculty; citta is the content it deals with; saññā is the function of perceiving and recognising those contents; paññā is the resulting knowledge; and viññāna is broadest term encompassing these functions.

It doesn't pay to insist on these distinctions and one must pay close attention to how the word is being used in Pāli - translators can often obscure the subtleties here - even a very reliable translator like Bhikkhu Bodhi for instance admits to translating both citta and mano as 'mind' under most circumstances. An exception is SN 12.61 which has citta, mano, and viññāna all in one sentence, where he translates as 'mind', 'mentality', and 'consciousness' - though there, ironically, they may just be simple synonyms. (Connected Discourses p.595, and p.769, n.154).

~~oOo~~

See other Philological Odds & Ends posts:

• I: tathāgata, sūtra, śramaṇa, loka, gahapati/gṛhapati.
• II: cakravartin, cintāmaṇi, yoniso manasikara, pāramitā, etymology.
• III: bodhisattva, anagārikā, samyak/mithyā.
• IV: vrata, mitra, kavi.
• V: megha, mañju, saṅgha.
• VI: Meditation words

Complexity & Simplicity in Doctrine

THIS IS A DIAGRAM showing the Canonical variants of paṭicca-samuppāda in both its lokiya (left) and lokuttara (middle) forms along with the bojjhaṅgas or factors of awakening (right) which have some cross-over. The lokiya being more usually know as the 'nidānas', or in the Triratna movement the 'cyclic nidānas'. The lokuttara known as the 'Spiral Path', the 'positive nidānas', or 'progressive conditionality'. I have started calling them the upanisās and hope to popularise this. I constructed this diagram because I like to think visually - certain relationships are easier to see graphically - and because I had some new (free) software to play with in the form of the Visual Understanding Environment. If you click on the image you can see the full sized version which is 7578 x 3591 px.

When paṭicca-samuppāda is taught in traditional circumstances it is typically not this very complex view that is taught. What is taught is a synthesis which irons out all of the complexity and condenses all of the variation into the standard 12 nidānas, and usually leaves out the upanisās all together. Even in the Triratna Order, which emphasises the upanisās as being of central importance, we only teach the version found in the Upanisā Sutta (SN 12.23).

This raises two questions I think. Firstly why is the canonical account of paṭicca-samuppāda so complex, and even contradictory? Secondly, why is the presentation of paṭicca-samuppāda so simplified and coherent?

I can think of several reasons why paṭicca-samuppāda might be complex. Both scholars and buddhists believe that paṭicca-samuppāda is a general principle which can be expressed in a variety of ways. The general principle is that 'things' arise in dependence on conditions. I've critiqued this view (see A General Theory of Conditionality? and Paṭicca-samuppāda: a Theory of Causation?), but in the end I think it is inevitable that we see the general nature of the principle of conditionality. And any general principle can be illustrated using a variety of concepts, images and metaphors. So we might expect to find complexity. There is also the generally acknowledged idea that the Buddha responded to individuals, explaining things in a language, and at a level, which they could understand. This might explain some of the variation, and a certain amount of contradiction. The Buddha had the goal of liberation in mind, but allowed for any number of paths to get there. Anything which conduces to liberation is Dharma! (see What is Buddhism?) Some of the contradictions are in the order of development in the morality part of the upanisās section of the diagram. These don't amount to show stoppers, but are just different ways of presenting the dynamics of morality. I've confessed to other confusions concerning the lokiya side of things which I think are more serious problems with the model.

Another reason for complexity is that the composition and transmission of these texts, and their collation into a Canon, took place over several centuries. It also seems likely that variations emerged in different communities - what we might these days call transmission lineages. Evidence for these lineages can be found where the same story occurs in different versions. Look for instance at the story of Vaseṭṭha and Bharadvaja in DN 27, MN 98, and Sn 3.9 (and compare with DN 13 as well) - these suggest to me one story remembered different ways. Some scholars (especially Tillman Vetter, following Eric Frauwallner) have speculated that the 12 nidānas were originally two sequences that that have been joined together. One of the supporting observations they make is that there are several Canonical sequences that begin with taṇha (e.g. SN 12.52), though to suggest that this is somehow 'original', rather than merely fragmentary is actually quite doubtful - especially in light of all of the other fragments of doctrine floating around the Canon! Joanna Jurewicz and Richard Gombrich have suggested that especially the first four of the 12 nidānas were added to a shorter sequence in order to satirise Vedic cosmogony because these terms have a particular resonance for Brahmins [1]. This idea of historical process may be the only way to make sense of the various fragments, or sequences that skip steps.

The complexity of the Canonical accounts of paṭicca-samuppāda are comprehensible, and even predictable under the circumstances. But why has the tradition condensed all this to a single set of 12 nidānas, ignored variation and dropped the upanisās all together?

Obviously it makes teaching about paṭicca-samuppāda a lot easier to present it in a simplified version. The discussion of all of the variations is time consuming and is potentially confusing. So there are didactic or pedagogical reasons for beginning with a simple version. I don't understand, however, why the simple version became the only version. If the tradition goes to all the trouble to preserve this vast corpus of literature, why did it lose interest in the detailed content of that literature? After the synthesis produced by Buddhaghosa there seems little interest in critical scholarship in the Theravāda until the modern era, and that was stimulated by the Western critical traditions. And in the Mahāyāna they seem to be immersed in sorting out the significance of their own doctrinal innovations to pay much attention to these basic issues. We seem to have mistaken the map for the territory at some point.

One of the interesting quirks of history is the complete loss of the upanisā sequence in received traditions. Though the sequence occurs once in the Visuddhimagga (Vism i.32) it is given no prominence. As far as I know it does not feature in Mahāyāna texts at all, nor in contemporary Theravāda presentations of the Dhamma. [2] Sangharakshita speculates that it was a preference for via negativa arguments - what he polemically calls "one-sided negativism" [3] - that the upanisā sequence was lost sight of, but in fact we do not know the answer to this conundrum. The full recovery of the teaching has not yet been completed either, because all present published accounts of the upanisā sequence rely on the Upanisā Sutta (SN 12.23) and as I argue in my essay on the upanisā sequences (Onramps to the Spiral Path - pdf) this sutta is not representative of the other Canonical accounts.

It also seems that one of the functions of religion is to provide some certainty, or at least the illusion of certainty. A nice, simple model of reality suggests that life or the universe is actually simple and that certainty is possible. Presenting a simplified model as a beginning is fine, however in many quarters the knowledge that it is only a simplified model seems to have been forgotten. I suggest that this is a symptom of not studying our own texts - we tend to take our knowledge of Buddhism from contemporary accounts of commentarial traditions, precisely because they are simplified and easier to understand. Most people do not seek complexity, they seek simplicity; and most of us are uncomfortable with uncertainty.

Complexity is difficult to communicate or understand. One of the best ways for dealing with complexity is to look for patterns. So in the diagram above we see that many factors repeat in the various schemes, and that they clump together in related categories: many of the elements are to do with morality for instance, while others are related to meditation. So we describe the complex situation in simpler terms - the threefold path of morality, meditation and wisdom is one useful scheme for organising the complexity we find in the Pāli Canon. This is technically called a reductive explanation - and most Buddhist doctrine is highly reductive. It is important to remember that a reductive explanation only simplifies the explanation for the purposes of communication, it does not reduce the phenomena in any way. Ironically, there seems to be a prejudice against reductionism amongst many Buddhists, perhaps because of a tendency to forget about the distinction I've just made. Every conceptualisation involves some reduction of complexity, and Buddhism as communicated in texts is always reductive, always trying to communicate meaningfully about the complexity of human experience, through simplifications, generalisations, and broad categories. This is not a problem unless we take the reductive explanations literally. As Alfred Korzybski said: the map is not the territory.

Books and articles are still being written about the Dharma to supplement a commentarial tradition stretching back in all likelihood to the time of the Buddha himself. Contemporary scholars have yet to reach a full consensus regarding the complexity of the nidāna sequences, but the complexity of the upanisā sequences has received almost no scholarly attention. My own essay on the upanisā sequence is not intended for an academic audience, but aims to provide a scholarly account for the Triratna Order (I reference in-house documents and discussions that would no doubt be disqualified in an academic journal). The idea of lokuttara paṭicca-samuppāda is still mostly a lost idea.

~~oOo~~

Notes

1. Joanna Jurewicz's idea is summarised in chapter 9 of Richard Gombrich's book What the Buddha Thought. I think Gombrich overstates the importance of Jurewizc's discovery. It is interesting, but it's not obvious that the sequence was formulated primarily as a parody. There is unexplored complexity here!
   
2. There are two exceptions that I know of. Bhikkhu Bodhi wrote Transcendental Dependent Arising (1980) in response to Sangharakshita's The Three Jewels. Ayya Khema wrote about the Spiral Path in When the Iron Eagle Flies (1991) and, as she was a personal friend of Sangharakshita, I suspect she also got the idea from him.
3. Sangharakshita (1993) A Survey of Buddhism. 7th ed., Windhorse, p.136.

The latest version of the diagram is on my dependent arising webpage, where you can also find partial versions of the diagram, and some other essays. I've printed it on A1 paper, and it is just readable. A0 would be better.