Papañca 1: Translating Papañca

AMONGST THE DIFFICULT and obscure terms we Buddhists inherited from our Iron Age Indian predecessors, papañca is one of the most intriguing. Papañca is an interesting case study of a concept which, despite being rendered in English relatively easily, remains very difficult to understand. In this first of two essays I will look at how to translate this word, while in the second I will look at what the word means in context.

It's become common to translate the word as 'proliferation'. I followed this practice myself in 2009 when commenting on the Madhupiṇḍika Sutta, aka the Honey Ball Sutta (Proliferation). Bodhi's translation was based on a manuscript translation by Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli. However, in choosing to renderpapañca as 'proliferation' he says that he was influenced by Bhikkhu Ñāṇananda (see Middle Length Discourses p.1204, n.229). Other translators and scholars have chosen a range of terms:

• I.B. Horner: obsession
• F. L. Woodward: difficulty (obstruction)
• Nyanaponika: diffuseness
• Thanissaro: objectification
• K.R. Norman: diversification
• Sue Hamilton: making manifold

The Pāli Text Society Dictionary (PED) derives the word papañca (Skt prapañca) a root √pac or √pañc 'to spread', which forms stems with a nasal giving. This root is included in Pāṇini's Dhātupāṭha, unfortunately, it is not included in Whitney's Roots. Monier-Williams' Dictionary lists "pac or pañc 1: to spread out, to make clear or evident." (p.575a) and it seems at first glance that our word is generated from this root. The underlying metaphor, if this is correct, is analytical: separating things out in order to make plain what is there. Sometimes when objects are all jumbled up we cannot see what's what, and so we separate them in order to allow the differences to be clear. Hence, the double meaning of separate and clarify. Lexicographers have seen papañceti as a denominative verb, i.e., a verb derived from the noun papañca. The root is more nominal than most and, indeed, there do not appear to be any other words which derive from this root. Which suggests that the traditional etymology may be wrong. In the Sanskrit grammatical tradition, from at least the time of Patañjali, the word prapañca is used to indicate specifying the instances which come from a general rule (lakṣana) or the expansion of that rule into examples. It is used in this sense in the Vyākaraṇamahābhāṣya. 

If we look at the semantic field ‘to spread’ then there is a Proto-Indo-European root *pet ‘to spread’ which comes into English in words via Latin (via French): expand, pan, pass, past, and spawn; via Germanic fathom, and compass. From this root we see in Greek πετάννῡμι (petannumi) ‘to spread out sails’; in Avestan paθana- (pathana) 'wide, broad'; and in Swedish panna ‘forehead’. It’s clear from other branches of the Indo-European family that the second consonant is quite changeable. However, the Sanskrit cognate based on Avestan paθana would be √prath ‘to spread’ (with forms prathate, pṛthu, prathana). This is the only possible alternative I have been able to locate.

Richard Gombrich derives papañca from pañca 'five' and suggests that it should mean "quintuplication" (What the Buddha Thought, p.205). He notes that in some texts (e.g., Mahābhārata) the world evolves from "primal unity" into sets of five, for example the five sense, the five great elements. There are, in fact, a large number of sets of five in Sanskrit literature, and these become much more prominent in Tantric literatures where they are arranged in layered maṇḍalas with four cardinal points and a centre. The symbolism is often that the four are synthesised in the central fifth, and that the maṇḍala itself represents the whole universe. Tantra, in particular, looks for homologies between these sets of five. The problem, as Gombrich notes, is that we find no evidence of the Sanskrit prapañca being used in Vedic texts early enough for the Buddha to have known about them. However, the evolution into sets of five is a theme in Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad and other Upaniṣads without using the word prapañca. As mentioned, Pāṇini records the root √pac/pañc and he lived about a generation or two after the Buddha. The suggestion is that, although the word is coined around the time of the Buddha, the concept is somewhat older. I think Gombrich is on the right track and would like to offer some refinements to his theory.

The PIE root of the numeral five is *penkwe, from which Vedic páñca derives and gives us Sanskrit pañcan and Pāli pañca. The PIE numerals have remained remarkably stable across the Indo-European language family, e.g.

Greek: pénte
Avestan: panca
Latin: quīnque
Welsh: pump
German : fünf (Germanic languages substitute /f/ for /p/ - known as Grimm's Law)

Monier Williams offers a clue to the meaning of papañca/prapañca when he notes that pañcan 'five' means 'to spread out the hand with its five fingers'. That there would be a link between the number five and the five fingers is not surprising. Indeed, PIE *penkwe, also means finger, and this link is present in Germanic and Slavic languages. The word 'fist' is also related in West Germanic languages (English, Dutch, German) via *fungkhstiz from PIE *pngkstis, and in Slavic languages.

English

five

finger

fist

Dutch

vijf

vinger

vuist

German

fünf

finger

faust

Danish

fem

finger

Croatian

pet

prst

pesnica

Czech

pět

prst

pěst

Polish

pięć

palec

pięść

Russian

pyatʹ

palets

However note that :

Sanskrit

pañcan

aṅguli

muṣṭi

Pāli

pañca

aṅguli

muṭṭhi

Latin

quīnque

digitus

pugnus

Greek

pénte

daktýlōn

grothiá

That the relationship between five and finger is not present in Sanskrit is a weakness of this line of reasoning. However, other words are preserved in archaic forms. For example, the standard Sanskrit word for 'heart' is hṛd. The word śraddhā preserves a form more closely related to PIE *√kred 'heart'. PIE /k/ regularly becomes /ś/ in Sanskrit. Once in Sanskrit śrad then undergoes another change to hṛd, which is used in all other circumstances except the semantic field of ‘trust’. That the change came later is shown by the Avestan zərəd- ‘heart’, and zraz-dā- ‘believe’ (= Skt. śraddhā = Latin credō). I’m proposing, somewhat speculatively, that a parallel process occurred with pañca in connection with fingers.

If this is true, then rather than simply 'quintuplication' (i.e., multiplying by five) the underlying metaphor is one that draws on the physical facts of the hand: the five fingers emerge from the hand; one can spread the fingers and separate them to make them distinct. In English we sometimes call the fist a "bunch of fives". Opening the fist makes it clear if something is held in the hand or not – the open hand is a universal gesture of greeting. The hand supplies us with the physical experience of unfolding to reveal complexity (five from one), and at the same time clarity (empty hand, spreading the fingers). This explanation is consistent with the theories of metaphor put forward by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, namely that metaphors derive from how we physically interact with the world.

The suffix pa– (Skt. pra–) is related to the Latin prefix pro-, and has two main senses: 'forward motion', and by association 'intensification'. So on face value the word papañca means 'to spread forth, to expand out'. From this we can see that ‘proliferate’ suits the etymology reasonably well. Indeed, there is some similarity in the etymology since 'proliferate' comes from Latin prole 'offspring' which itself derives from PIE pro– 'forth' + *al 'growth'; prole is combined with ferre 'to bear' and therefore prolific means 'bearing offspring'. Proliferation produces a range of conjugations: proliferating, proliferated, which allow us to produce good English translations. Norman’s choice of ‘diversification’ is fine. The meaning is quite similar, though for reasons I cannot specify, I feel that ‘proliferation’ captures something of the dynamic quality of the process under consideration. The popularity of Ñāṇananda’s influential essay Concept and Reality in Early Buddhism has helped ‘proliferation’ to become a standard (I have a copy on order and it will be interesting to see if we agree!)

This leaves us to explain the alternatives, and give some reasons for rejecting them. "Diffuseness" means spread out in the sense of dispersed, and this just seems wrong. The translators who choose variations on "obsession" or "hindrance" seem to be following the Pāli commentaries which equate papañca with the kilesas. For example, the commentary on the Papañcakhaya Sutta (Udāna 7.7) by Dhammapala says:

"Passion is a proliferation, aversion is a proliferation, confusion is a proliferation, craving is a proliferation, view is a proliferation, and conceit is a proliferation."

This ties papañca into the various kinds of hindrances to progress on the Buddhist path, or the unskilful kinds of thoughts that obsess the unawakened, and suggests to many translators (especially before Ñāṇananda) an interpretative translation; i.e., they try to translate the concept rather than the word. Thanissaro does similarly with "objectification". This procedure is not wrong, by any means, but my preference is to translate the word, and essay the concept separately. The main advantage of this approach is that our word is used in slightly different ways, and the more conceptual translation--especially Thanissaro’s "objectification"--do not always make for felicitous English, such as his "objectifies non-objectification" in the Koṭṭhita Sutta (4.174).

In the next essay I will look at various suttas in order to see how this word is used in practice in a Buddhist context.

~~oOo~~

Here Be Dragons: On The Limits of Science.

THOSE WHO RAIL against science usually make the same point: viz that science has limitations which stem from the nature of the human psyche and senses, and that there are places where "science cannot go". Some things are simply "not measurable" and consciousness is always at the top of the list of things not amenable to measurable.

In theology this is known as the "God of the gaps" argument. Retreating in the face of the successes of science, some Christian theologians resorted to arguing that God was to be found where science ended: i.e. in the gaps between measurements. Some Buddhists (and others) argue that the "true nature" of consciousness (or reality, or whatever) is found only where scientific investigation ends. Consciousness is off the edge of the map: here be dragons (or nāgas in our case). However other theologians realised that the God of the gaps argument meant that as knowledge expanded, God shrank. Some of those who realised this preferred the even more irrational all-or-nothing argument: i.e. the whole universe was God's work. Buddhists who adopt a God of the gaps argument will find themselves increasingly marginalised as the scientific investigation of consciousness proceeds.

Perhaps the first person to complain about the obsession of scientists with measurement, and certainly one of the most vociferous, was the poet and engraver William Blake (1757-1827). Blake saw visions of God, Jesus, and/or angels most days of his life. He conversed with his visions and to him they were as much a part of life as his wife, his few friends, his house, or the city of London where he lived. Blake hated Isaac Newton with a blazing passion, and the depiction of him (above) with his dividers doing geometry while ignoring the texture of the world around him, was ironic and polemical, though not the everyone seems to get this. For Blake the empirical approach could not measure the higher truth he felt he met in his visions. In his own time Blake was considered a (mostly) harmless crank, but later he was championed by arch Romantic and co-founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Today (for good or ill) Blake would no doubt be treated as "mentally ill".

In the wake of Blake we sometimes find Buddhists at the forefront of the attack on science and materialism, along with Christian fundamentalists, social studies scholars and French philosophers. Sadly the understanding of science in these attacks seems not to have progressed much beyond Blake's time, and we see scientists accused of seeking or claiming Absolute Knowledge, or thinking they can solve all the worlds problems. In fact it is religions which claim absolute knowledge (which they don't have) and the ability to solve all the world's problems (which they have demonstrably not done). Most people are distinctly better off for having science in the world, and recently Harvard Professor Steven Pinker has suggested, in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, that the values of the Enlightenment have contributed to a long term reduction in violence across the globe. His claim is hotly contested, but one feels that with the retreat of Christianity a vengeful spirit is being exorcised from Europe. That there is a substrate of violent behaviour remaining should not detract from the achievements of Enlightenment values. Secularism and trade have created a more stable, peaceful and unified Europe than Christianity ever did (current problems not withstanding).

But what of this claim that consciousness is inaccessible to science? I think this claim is now demonstrably false. The map is now a globe, we may not have every island and cove mapped, but we know the rough shape of the continents. Turns out there are no dragons.

However before looking more closely at this issue I want to briefly mention another anti-materialist claim: that the brain is simply not complex enough to sustain consciousness. I had wondered about this, but I now think this is one of many failures of imagination on the part of the anti-science lobby. Part of the problem is that it's difficult to get a handle on big numbers. So if I say that the human brain has about 100 billions neurons each with 1000 connections to other neurons, i.e. 100 trillion connections in total, this doesn't really mean anything to most people. To get a sense of it there is a very interesting TED talk by Henry Markram which shows a visualisation from a realistic computer model of a tiny part of the brain of a rat. Here we are visualising a model equivalent to perhaps 1 ten-millionth of the human brain, and yet the complexity is both staggering and beautiful. Does a brain possess the complexity required to produce and sustain consciousness? I would say undoubtedly, yes, it does.

And so to the idea that consciousness is not accessible to measurement. For many decades now neuroscientists have been studying the way that brain injuries affect consciousness, cognition, and personality. This has given us a rough overview of the way that mind depends on brain. More recently various types of brain scan have allowed us to begin to show in more detail the correlations between brain activity and mental activity, increasingly this is done in real time. We can be reasonably certain that mental activity is always associated with brain activity. Some studies in animals have gone to a much greater level of detail with brain mapping. One group have precisely mapped out each of the 300 or so neurons of a nematode worm and all of the synapses. They have produced the Worm Atlas to help visualise it. The effort to map out the 100 trillion connections in a human brain has been formalised in the Human Connectome Project. It seems likely that with persistence a complete map of a human brain and all its connections will eventually be realised. This will give us undreamed of insights into how the brain, and therefore the mind, functions.

I glossed over some of the aspects of consciousness that can and have been studied when I reviewed Thomas Metzinger talking about the first-person perspective. This is one of the ways of studying of how consciousness, particularly self consciousness, is affected by injury. But some neuroscientists have gone further and created non-invasive, and non-destructive ways to test and challenge our sense of self. I've already described Thomas Metzinger's article which links the idea of a soul with out-of-body experiences (OBE), but the OBE provides other insights into the flexibility and contingency of our sense of ownership over our body. A recent feature article in Nature News surveys the life and work of Henrik Ehrsson in this area. Ehrsson uses virtual reality equipment to alter how the body is incorporated into the Self-Model. The self --that is the thinking, ego centre--can be experienced as transferred to an inanimate object for instance. That is to say that the sense of "I" being behind the eyes can be disrupted so that it seems to be located outside the body, and even inside an inanimate artificial body. Similarly inanimate objects can be incorporated into the body image to the extent that seeing them touched can produce a 'felt' sensation. This tells us that the sense of self is not hard wired, but virtual. Metzinger talks about it as a "simulation".

As author and blogger Ed Yong says "Ehrsson's work also intrigues neuroscientists and philosophers because it turns a slippery, metaphysical construct — the self — into something that scientists can dissect." He also cites neuroscientist David Eagleman: "We can say if we wobble the signals this way, our conscious experience wobbles in this way. That's a lever we didn't have before". And Thomas Metzinger: "There are things like selfhood that people think cannot be touched by the hard sciences. They are now demonstrably tractable."

The field of neuroscience has made huge progress in the last 20 years. News of this progress leaks out in popular press coverage only to a limited extent, and often with distortions. More can be gleaned from popular books by authors such as Vilayanur Ramachandran, Oliver Sacks and Antonio Damasio (to name some of my favourites). But look at the bibliographies of such books, or do a Google scholar search and you'll get a better idea of the scope and scale of the enterprise. Lay people can scarcely imagine it, and even with my degree in chemistry I cannot follow the great bulk of it, and must rely on interpreters and popularisers to get a sense of what the scientists are discovering.

Of course for Buddhists some of the most interesting research in this area is the study of how meditation affects the brain in the short and long term. We are now getting information about which parts of the brain are activated by different styles of meditation, and how regular meditation practice creates long term changes in the brain. It is these kinds of studies, with objective evidence of benefit that relies on data and not metaphysical claims or mere subjectivity, which are helping to popularise mindfulness techniques (including meditation) beyond our usual audience.

It seems to me that the perceived limitations of science are often in fact the limitations of the perceptions of the critics of science. In the Romantic critique of science there, ironically, seems to be a massive failure of imagination, and inability to take in and think about what is actually happening in the world. Very few critics seem to have understood the impact of the two great figures of the philosophy of science in the 20th century: Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn; let along the progress of knowledge itself. Too many seem to ignore the various revolutions in thinking that have occurred in the years since Blake vented his spleen at the great figures of the Enlightenment. In my view Blake is not a good role model. He may have been a Romantic figure--a lonely visionary, enunciating a higher truth that lesser mortals could not comprehend --but he was unable to sustain relationships with his friends for instance, and was patently a very frustrated and angry man, who blamed his inability to communicate on others. Blake was no saint, and, in the end, not much of a prophet either.

Humans have limitations, but one of the stand-out characteristics of humans is not accepting those limitations and pushing beyond them. So, yes, science has limits, but they are not set by outdated views, and ideological criticism. We are usually limited only by the scope of our imagination.

~~oOo~~

Further listening, reading and viewing

• 'The Scientific Method.' In Our Time (with Melvin Bragg). BBC Radio 4. 26.1.12. Podcast mp3.
• ' The Age of Doubt.' In Our Time (with Melvin Bragg). BBC Radio 4. 9.3.00. Podcast mp3.
• 'Henry Markram builds a brain in a supercomputer' TEDGlobal. Jul 2009.
  
• The Blue Brain Project
• 'Gero Miesenboeck reengineers a brain.' TEDGlobal 2010.
• Neil Burgess: 'How Your Brain Tells You Where You Are.' TEDSalon, London Spring 20011.
• Jayarava. First Person Perspective - precis of a lecture by Thomas Metzinger.
• Human Connectome Project.
• Yong, Ed. 'Out-of-body experience: Master of illusion.' Nature News Feature. 7 Dec 2011.