A Taxonomy of Afterlife Beliefs

I STARTED TO BE INTERESTED in this topic of the different responses to the certainty of death and found it hard to find information organised in the way that I wanted to think about it. I was looking for a taxonomy of afterlife beliefs, or eschatologies, but what one generally finds is the beliefs of various religions without analysis of the characteristics of the belief, and no consideration of the similarities between apparently disparate religions. So here is my own taxonomy of afterlife beliefs, setting them out according to common features rather than religious affiliation. I follow the scheme with some remarks about afterlife beliefs generally.

Immortality.

In this belief one seeks not to die. It is characteristic of Daoism, but also of certain New Age sects. Daoists avoid death through magic. New Agers, influenced by Indian yogis, preach "physical immortality" through yoga and especially diet. At least one Buddhist teacher offers immortality as a fruit of practice, though rather implausibly, even if 'deathless' (amṛta) is a synonym for nirāvṇa it comes from not being born into another life, rather than not dying in this life.

Resurrection

This is a special subset of immortality belief. In this belief it is possible for special individuals to come back from the dead - uniting the same mind and body. Jesus is the exemplar, and is considered by some to be physically immortal.

Destination

In destination beliefs the dead have a one-way ticket to a final post-mortem realm. Personal identity can be retained on arrival or relinquished. In the latter case one can merge with a god personified, or with a god in the abstract (e.g. the godhead, the universe, the essence).

When linked with morality it results in eternal heaven and hell. Both heaven and hell reflect the ideals of the cultures which propose them, often they are the ideal version of a man's life (women's ideals are usually ignored). Most mono-theist religions maintain some form of this after-life belief. However it seems to me that believers can reasonably expect to go to Heaven and that Hell is for other people, especially non-believers. The idea that Hell is for "sinners" is nonsensical in the face of the saving power of the Messiah.

The Catholic church introduced an temporary intermediate destination - purgatory - to enable necessary purging of any remaining sin before entering heaven. Sin here is seen as a kind of ritual pollution which adheres to the soul, but can be cleansed - very reminiscent of Hindu, and to some extent Jain, karma doctrines.

Recycling

The idea here is that after a sojourn one is reborn. This is widespread across the world, but shows a great deal of variation. For some rebirth is a good thing, for others it is not and an escape from rebirth becomes the goal of life. Following Obeyesekere I've identified these forms. [1]

1. One is reborn immediately after death, amongst one's own people.
2. One is reborn in another world amongst one's ancestors, and lives there for a long time. Then one dies in the other world and is reborn again in this world, usually amongst one's own people. This is the oldest Vedic belief. And seems to be behind the this world/other world terminology found in the Pāli Canon.
3. The destination after death is connected with ritual actions - only the adept obtains rebirth amongst their ancestors in another world, or their family in this world. Others have less desirable destinations. Seen in orthodox Hinduism.
   
4. Destination after death is connected with morality - minimally this requires a bifurcation into heavenly/hellish states, but these are not permanent and one still cycles around. Buddhism posits 5, 6, or 10 possible destinations each of which may be subdivided into many sub-levels. For early Buddhism the rebirth happens with no time lapse. Tibetan Buddhists add the idea of the bardo - a kind of intermediate state or clearing house which determines one's destination on the basis of the development of one's consciousness at the time of death. The bardo also provides an early opportunity for escape from repeated rebirth.
5. Avatar. In this kind of belief the same individual, despite the possibility of escape, deliberately returns to the world again and again for the benefit of others - e.g. the Tibetan tulku; the advanced bodhisattva in Buddhism, and some Hindu gods.
   

Seeding

There are some forms of afterlife belief which do not entail any actual life. I'm not sure if this is a genuine afterlife belief - it seems to be a consolation for not believing in life after death. But it's worth including for completeness sake.

Some would say that we live on as memories. For instance we may say that someone "lives on in the hearts and minds of their loved ones". Similarly when we leave children behind we have left something ourselves to continue on. We could call this genetic seeding - it's not our life that continues, but our genes. There is also intellectual or artistic seeding where we leave behind evidence of our creative work - books, art, music, and ideas.

Hybrid forms

Although the early Vedic model was simply cyclic, in Bṛhadāranyaka Upaniṣad one can see it becoming more sophisticated. We see, for instance, a version in which the post-mortem destination is linked to ritual funeral rites (śraddha). But we also see an escape to a single destination as well - usually in terms of companionship with brahman/Brahmā (the former being the abstract universal principle, the latter being the personified creator god). Here we see the two main types above - destination and recycling - combined into one complex system.

Buddhism also posits a more or less endless cycle of birth and death if one makes no effort, but with an escape route - amṛta "the deathless" - which removes one from cycle permanently. However one cannot say anything about the destination the tathāgata ("one in that state") after death. Later a further elaboration was added which was the Pure Land - an intermediate idealised destination which is perfect for gaining enlightenment, and reflected the cultural values first of medieval India and then China (compare this with the Catholic purgatory)

Personal vs Cosmic Eschatology

Some belief systems overlay personal eschatology - i.e. the post-mortem fate of the individual - with a more universal eschatology - the fate of the universe. So for some Christians the world will end at some point - the end times or Apocalypse.

Similarly in India it is common to see the world as going through great cycles of evolution and devolution with a world destroying cataclysm leading to rebirth of the cosmos. Though presumably the liberated are no more caught up in these cycles than they are the cycles of personal existence.

Discussion

Buddhist afterlife beliefs are variations on a hybrid model. Traditionally Buddhists believe that without making an effort they are reborn in a beginningless/endless cycle. The fact that the cycles are eternal may well be an extension of the unwillingness to see death as the end of consciousness. Ethics is what determines one's destination and there are 5,6, or 10 main destinations that are subdivided. These range from heavenly to hellish with the human world being middling, but still ultimately disappointing - although it is generally only from the human realm that one can escape the cycles. Buddhists include heaven within the impermanent cycling around. Liberation from the rounds of rebirth is possible with effort and results in an indeterminate state but not in rebirth in this world. Variations include an intermediate state - easy to attain - called the Pure Land from where liberation is guaranteed. The Tibetans add the bardo state which is a prolonged limbo in which decisions can be made - consciously or unconsciously - by the disembodied being about their destination.

Clearly Buddhists agree on the broad outline of this hybrid model, but details vary from culture to culture often exhibiting the direct influence of local culture.

We need to note that all afterlife beliefs (except perhaps the Seeding variety which I will leave out of this discussion) by definition require a mind-body duality. While the body dies something does not die but persists. This insubstantial aspect of the being may be called mind or soul or spirit or something else, but it is not part of the body, and not permanently bound to the body. All afterlife beliefs are therefore fundamentally dualistic. All recycling afterlife beliefs therefore also create another problem in that they require a mechanism by which the mind (or whatever) can detach from the body and reattach to another body - and as Buddhists we do need to acknowledge that our own forms of rebirth belief share these fundamental problems. Where the afterlife belief entails 'memories' of past lives this entails the further difficult problem of how memories are stored and accessed, and why they are not generally available. Such metaphysical problems seem insoluble to me.

Recent research on children's afterlife beliefs [2] suggest that even young children understand that when a person dies their physical functions cease. However children seem to believe that mental functioning may continue in the dead 'person'. So the deceased may not need to eat, but will still feel hungry. It may be that having developed a theory of mind, i.e. the ability to see other beings as self conscious in the way that we are self conscious, that we find it hard to imagine a dead person not having an inner life, even when they clearly have no outer life. We also have a tendency to see self-consciousness in places where it cannot logically exist. Animism is far from dead, and was given a boost by 19th Century Romantics.

I would say that some sort of afterlife belief is one of the fundamental characteristics of religion and that it is difficult to imagine a religion which did not address this question (I can't think of an example). It is true that nihilists have arisen within societies, and sometimes become quite prominent, but I also cannot think of a generally nihilistic society or culture.

Philosopher Thomas Metzinger has also put forward the idea that because the strongest urge, desire, drive (it is difficult to find terms which are not anthropomorphic) of life is to continue - aka the survival instinct - that faced with the certainty of death we simply cannot cope and chose to believe in continuity whatever the evidence. Hence though science has undermined religion since the European Enlightenment, it has not annihilated it, and indeed fundamentalist religion, with the greatest reliance on faith and superstition, appears to be on the rise. What 'feels right', can over-ride what 'makes sense', or to put it another way it feels wrong that life does not continue, so we prefer unlikely invention. Metzinger makes the interesting point that attacking such beliefs, especially from an empirical realist (aka 'scientific') point of view is not an ethically neutral venture. Attacking deeply held beliefs, even if they be factually erroneous, under these circumstances may in fact create more suffering than the ignorance itself. At the very least we must consider our motives for attacking other people's beliefs.

That said, when we line all these different kinds of belief up together I'm at a loss to decide between them - they all seem equally unlikely to me, especially in light of theory of mind research. We should not fall into the error of thinking of assertions as evidence. All of these forms of belief are supported by assertions and arguments, but by what possible criteria would we assess them, either individually or comparatively? We simply choose to believe without reference to rational criteria. But then this how human beings make decisions, so perhaps it's not great surprise.

~~oOo~~

Isn't is always the way. An hour after I hit the "publish" button I find an interesting article on death from precisely the kind of perspective that I'm interested in: Afterlife in Cross-Cultural Perspective. From the Encyclopedia of Death and Dying.

Notes

1. This section in particular relies on Gananath Obeyesekere. (2002) Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist and Greek Rebirth. University of California Press. Obeyesekere discusses rebirth theories found in the Americas, Africa, Polynesia, Ancient Greece and India and provides a very useful taxonomy of the development of rebirth eschatologies that has influenced this post.
2. See for instance:
   
   • Oxford Centre for Anthropology & Mind.
   • Bering et al. (2005) "The development of ‘afterlife’ beliefs in religiously and secularly schooled children." British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 23, 587–607. pdf
     
   
   
   
   

Beginning and End Marker in Buddhist Texts

Rañjana yig gmo + extension
and double daṇḍa

I have often wondered about the symbols one sees at the beginning and end of texts and mantras. I've been researching them for my forthcoming book. It possible to consider these as simple decoration, but scholars of Buddhist texts and inscriptions have often interpreted them as something more. The Tibetans seem to have the most developed and elaborate forms of these, and they have a clear name for the symbol, so let's start there.

Beginning Markers

Here are the Tibetan variations from the Tibetan Unicode block.

The general term seems to be yimgo (i.e. yig mgo) meaning 'head' or perhaps 'header'. The first symbol is bdra rnying yig mgo mdun ma which seems to mean 'old orthography header', so-called since it is used in early texts, while the more ornate version (no.3) is used currently. [West 2005, 2006] The second is the yimgo combined with the 'following yimgo' (yig mgo sgab ma) and a shad (see below). The 3rd and fourth are the standard yimgo these days (yig mgo mdun ma). The 5th and 6th are the yimgo decorated with a shad (yig mgo phur shad ma; the shad is used as a punctuation mark and equivalent to the Indic daṇḍa); and the old style yimgo with both shad and tsheg (yig mgo tsheg shad ma), the tsheg or syllable marker is usually a simply dot between syllables, but sometimes is more elaborate.

The modern Japanese Siddhaṃ has a yimgo with the same form as the archaic Tibetan yimgo.

The same kind of mark is seen (right) in the Lantsa and Rañjana scripts. The proposed Unicode block for Rañjana calls this the Rañjana yig mgo which suggests there is no indigenous explanation for it in Nepal. In fact I haven't found a definite Indic name for the symbol.

In older manuscripts the symbol is cruder an much more variable, but always a variation on the spiralling curve. As you can see below in the partial chart from Roth (1986) there was considerable variation. Virtually all of the possible orientations are seen in practice, including the one used in Tibetan and it's mirror image.

The symbol numbered 11 is found in the Patna Dharmapada (a famous manuscript with the Dharmapada in Sanskrit); 8 at the beginning of Vasubandhu's Abhidharmakośa. Tibetan Scholars have usually interpreted this symbol as oṃ, and modern scholars seem to have followed their lead. Notice no.17 from a Pala era inscription (ca 1174 AD) which shows the two together. They are obviously quite distinct, and the two wouldn't occur together if one was an abbreviated form of the other.

Others have sought to explain this symbol as an abbreviated form of the word siddhiḥ or even siddhir astu (Roth p.240). Margaret Cone for instance transcribes sign 11 as siddhaṃ in her Patna Dharmapada (p.35). Roth cites an example of the symbol and the word found together (right) in an unpublished manuscript of the Pañcakrama (a tantric text attributed to Nāgārjuna). Roth interprets the word as explaining the symbol preceding it, but I don't see why unless we presume that the symbol means siddhiḥ in the first place. In any case this one example shows that at the time the symbol was not graphically similar in any way to how the word was written.

The identification as oṃ may explain why we find so many texts transcribed as beginning with oṃ. When for instance the bhaiṣajyaguru-vaidūrya-prabharāja Sūtra is transcribed as beginning with the maṅgala-gāthā:

oṁ namaḥ sarvajñāya | namo bhagavate bhaiṣajyaguruvaidūryaprabharājāya tathāgatāya ||

The oṃ was in fact most likely a yimgo. Judging by the remarks by Roth and by Sander, many of the times we find oṃ in a Buddhist text which is not simply a mantra or dhāraṇī, we might really be seeing yimgo. The scribe was most likely concerned to begin with an auspicious symbol, but they did not have oṃ in mind.

The scholarly consensus seems to be that the curve represents siddhaṃ c.f. Salomon (1998, p.66-68). Certainly we know that many scribes did begin copying with the word siddhaṃ or siddhiḥ, hence the name of the script, but if they abbreviated it to the symbol the proof has yet to be found. So although in many editions of Buddhist texts we find oṃ, it's prevalence might have been greatly exaggerated. Personally, I doubt oṃ was used by Buddhists before the 7th or 8th century because it doesn't occur in the Mahāvairocana Abhisaṃbodhi Tantra.

Another possibility not previously considered is that it represents a snake. Symbols representing cobras appear on ancient Indian coins. To the right is a sketch of a coin from the Kuninda era (ca. 2nd century BCE - 1st CE) borrowed from the Resources for Collectors coin website. Between the horns of the deer is a sign which is described as "two cobras". You can see that they are very similar to the ancient Indian yimgo symbol, although apparently they always appear in between the deer horns. On the other side of the coin are other common symbols including the svastika, and the three jewels sign (see my post on the svastika). I wonder if the yimgo is actually a nāga?


End Markers

End of line or text markers are usually based on the Indic daṇḍa. The word daṇḍa means 'stick or stroke' and in Devanāgarī it is a simple vertical stroke |. In prose it is used rather variably to represent any kind of hiatus - where we might have a comma, a semi-colon, a colon, a dash, or a full-stop, in Deanāgarī one finds a daṇḍa. In Poetry the end of a pada (or line) is marked with a daṇḍa while the end of a gāthā (or stanza) is marked with a double daṇḍa ||. The earliest Indian inscriptions use no punctuation, and it took many centuries for the use of the daṇḍa to be standardised. I note that most examples of Japanese Siddhaṃ do not use any internal punctuation, but only mark the beginning and end of the text.

Rañjana also has a daṇḍa and double daṇḍa (right). One has to be careful not to mistake the daṇḍa for a diacritic mark, or double daṇḍa for a ta. Mantras will sometimes, as in the Tibetan scripts, combine a yimgo with a daṇḍa or double daṇḍa. You can see how this is used in the this woodblock print.

The Tibetan equivalent of the daṇḍa is called a shad (pronounced shé) meaning more or less the same thing. The Tibetans also use a dot at the end of syllables called a tsheg - the ornate forms of which occasionally replace the shad. There are a great number of elaborate shad and tsheg markers in Tibetan. Here are the shads from the Tibetan Unicode block:


These are: 1. shad; 2. nyis or double shad; 3. tsheg shad; 4; nyis tsheg shad; 5 rin chen spungs (mound of jewels) shad; 6. sbrul (snake stroke) shad*; 7. rgya gram (cross) shad*; 8. gter (treasure) tsheg - sometimes used in place of a shad. [* displayed with Tibetan Machine Uni font]. Some of these signs have specific uses in manuscripts, and others are simply decorative. The Tibetan texts I've seen mainly use the shad, double shad and gter tsheg.

The ends of chapters or texts received extra elaborate marks, but I must stop here. I will be including a longer version of this essay my forthcoming book.

References

• Cone, Margaret. (1989) Patna Dharmapada [transcription]. Pali Text Society. Reproduced online with Pāli Parallels, Metrical Commentary, Notes, and Indexes compiled by Ānandajoti Bhikkhu (2007): http://www.ancient-buddhist-texts.net/Buddhist-Texts/C5-Patna/Patna.pdf
  
• Everson, Michael. (2009) Preliminary proposal for encoding the Rañjana script in the SMP of the UCS. http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3649.pdf
• Jayarava. Siddhir astu. Visible Mantra Blog. http://visiblemantra.blogspot.com/2011/05/siddhir-astu.html
  
• Roth, Gustav. (1986) 'Mangala-symbols in Buddhist Sanskrit Manuscripts and Inscriptions' in Bhattacharya, G (ed.) Deyadharma : Studies in Memory of Dr D. C. Sircar. Sri Satguru Pubs. Delhi, p. 239-250.
• Salomon, Richard. (1998) Indian Epigraphy: a Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit and the other Indo-Aryan languages. Oxford University Press.
  
• Sander, Lore. (1986) 'Oṃ or Siddhaṃ: Remarks on Openings of Buddhist Manuscripts and Inscriptions from Gilgit and Central Asia' in Bhattacharya, G (ed.) Deyadharma : Studies in Memory of Dr D. C. Sircar. Sri Satguru Pubs. Delhi, p. 251-262.
• Unicode Consortium (2010) Tibetan Unicode specification. http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0F00.pdf
• West, Andrew. (2005) Proposal to encode two archaic Tibetan punctuation marks. http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3033.pdf
• West, Andrew. (2006) Proposal to encode three archaic Tibetan characters. http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3012.pdf [accompanied by some excellent images!]
  

Tibetan examples are illustrated using the attractive Jomolhari font, with some help from Tibetan Machine Uni where noted. Both are free and take quite different approaches to dbu can, giving plenty of variation. As far as I know there are no fonts for Tibetan scripts other than dbu can.

For another introduction to this subject see this blog post by Tashi Mannox: The heading character and Script construction.

Body and Mind

Assutavā Sutta
(SN 12.61, PTS S ii.94-95)

THUS HAVE I HEARD. One time the Buddha was staying in Sāvatthi in the Jeta Grove, in the park of Anāthapiṇḍika… [the Bhagavan said] the folks (puthujjana) who are unlearned (assutavā)[1], monks, might become fed-up (nibbindati) with the body composed of four elements, might lose interest (virajjati) in it, and might be freed (vimutti) from it. The reason? The taking up and putting down, the grasping and giving up[2] of this body four elements can be seen. Therefore the unlearned folk might become fed-up, lose interest, and be free.

However that which is called ‘thought’, ‘mind’, or ‘cognition’ is insufficient for the unlearned folk become fed-up, lose interest, and be freed from it. What is the reason? For a long time the unlearned folk have hung on, cherished, and succumbed to the thought ‘this is mine, I am this, this is myself’. Because of this it is insufficient for the unlearned folk to become fed-up, to lose interest in it, and be freed from it.

It would be best, monks, for the unlearned folk to approach the body as their self, rather than thought. What is the reason? The body made from the four elements is seen remaining for 1 season [3], 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, remaining for 100 seasons or more.

And that called ‘thought’, ‘mind’, or ‘cognition’ is night and day arising and ceasing, one after another. [4] Just like, monks, a monkey goes through a forest on the side of a mountain,[5] swinging from branch to branch. [6] So, monks, that which is called ‘thought’, ‘mind’, ‘cognition’ night and day is arising and ceasing, one after another.[7]

Therefore, monks, the learned (sutavā) noble-disciple (ariya-sāvaka)[8] pays close attention[9] to the dependently arisen origins: thus –

There being that, this is; with the arising of that, this arises. When that isn’t there, this isn’t; with the ceasing of that, this ceases: thus when there is ignorance there is volition, from the condition of volition there is cognition and so on, and this is the origin of the whole mass of disappointment. With the remainderless cessation of ignorance there is no volition, with the cessation of volition there is no cognition and so on, and this is the way the whole mass of disappointment ceases.

Seeing it like this the learned noble disciple is fed-up with forms, fed-up with sensations, fed-up with apperception, fed-up with volitions, fed-up with cognition; and being fed up, loses interest, and is free, and knows “birth is cut off, the perfect life is lived, what needed to be done is done; no more becoming here.”

~~o~~

Comments

The sutta makes two kinds of comparisons - between bodily and mental experience; and between ordinary people (assutavā puthujjana) and ideal disciples (sutavā ariyasāvaka).

The body does not change very fast and may continue on for a long lifetime changing only gradually, and leaving us with the perception of continuity, and therefore of a lasting identity. However even the ordinary person who has not heard (assutavā) the Buddhadhamma, and who is not making an effort (by definition) might still find the body disappointing, as they age, get ill, and die. They might still, according to this text, come to liberation from the body because of the dissatisfaction associated with the body. The Buddha allows that if you were going to identify with anything as your self, then the body would be a better candidate because it is far more stable. I think this is hyperbole for an audience of people already committed to the path, a point I'll come back to. In talking about getting to liberation the Buddha mentions the sequence of terms nibbindati - virajjhati - vimutti. This is the end of the upanisā sequence (c.f. AN 10.1-5, AN 11.1-5, & SN 12.23; see my blog Progress is Natural) and in suttas which have this sequence nibbindati arises from yathābhūta-ñāṇadassana: knowing & seeing the nature of experience.

However most of us think of 'I' as the thoughts in our mind - we identify ourselves with the content of our minds - cogito ergo sum "I think [about stuff], therefore I am" (sañjānāmi tasmā asmi). The text uses the three main terms associated with 'mind': citta, mano, and viññāṇa. Bhikkhu Bodhi renders them "mind, mentality, and consciousness" in his Saṃyutta translation (p.595) - and notes his struggle to find suitable distinctions as he routinely translates both citta and mano as 'mind' (p.769). I think my translation brings out later differentiations between these words, though I suspect this is overcooking things a little, and perhaps they are simply synonyms here. [c.f. Mind Words]. It is this identification with our thoughts which makes it unlikely that we will become fed-up our mental processes - we don't think of mental processes as 'us', at least not in the conscious way that we think about, e.g. what to have for dinner: to ourselves, we are our thoughts. The sense of being a self is vivid, transparent (i.e. we don't see ourselves making the identification), instantaneous, and persistent.

The mind goes from one mental event to another like a monkey swinging from branch to branch, grasping first this and then that object - and each time generating a cascade of sensations, responses and proliferation - which all happens so fast that it seems to just be the ways things are - this feature is referred to Thomas Metzinger as 'transparency' because we don't 'see' it. This description of the mental process is perhaps the most attractive feature of this text.

And part of what we do in this process is create a virtual point of view, or First Person Perspective - "I, me, mine". I've come to the conclusion, after many years of resistance and argumentation, that what is intended by attā in these cases is the ego, in more or less the same way that Western psychologist speak of it, as opposed to the soul-like ātman of Brahmanical religion which provides continuity between lives. (If I was a UK politician, this would be called a policy U-turn). I don't think Buddhists were cognisant enough with the kinds of ideas about ātman that we meet in the early Upaniṣads to warrant our directly linking the two. This sense of identification with, and ownership over the contents of our minds is what prevents us from becoming liberated. [C.f. First Person Perspective] This includes all the polemical terms like selfishness, egotism, and self-centredness, but I'm not sure it is simply a critique of selfishness - it seems to be about how we identify with experience, and how we therefore generate expectations of experience that it cannot deliver. Selfishness is one little corner of a much larger issue!

The Buddha is outlining the worst case scenario for the monks, before telling them what the ideal disciple would be like. The ideal disciple is sutavā 'education, learned' (literally: 'one who has heard'), and is described as ariya which we would typically associate with someone either liberated or well on their way to liberation (at least a sotapanna 'stream-entrant'). Presumably most of the monks are somewhere in the middle. It's a fine rhetorical strategy to show that they have come a long way from being ordinary lay people, but have some way to go before finishing their task.

The ideal disciple is one who employs yoniso-manasikara. I have explored this term in the Philogical odds and ends II, but would also refer readers to the Theravādin blog where another interpretation can be found which is very useful. However I think my own definition 'thinking about origins' is apposite here. The content which one is paying attention to is paṭicca-samuppāda - the formula imasmiṃ sati idaṃ hoti... and the nidāna sequence. (see also A General Theory of Conditionality for a critical look at the relationship between the two). In this case one is paying attention to how things arise from conditions - to the processes arising (and ceasing) in dependence on conditions. And it is clearly implied here that where one needs to focus this exploration is in the mind. It is the mind that we mostly identify with and which is very hard to see in a way that conduces to liberation. It is relatively straight forward to see the body as conditioned (it is even a truism in the Western intellectual tradition that 'things change'), but it is in seeing the processes of the mind this way that the breakthrough to bodhi comes.

I imagine that this was a tailored discourse. It may not be a general teaching on the relative qualities of mind and body, so much as a teaching for people who were ascetics in the first place. It seems to me that the Buddha assumes that the monks, unlike lay people, do not see the body as their self, and dis-identification with the body is exactly what we would expect of ascetics. And what they would need is a teaching on how to deal with identification with the mind. Note that he almost taunts them by saying - even an untutored ordinary person might become liberated by being fed-up with their body - so if you're a bhikkhu, or possibly an ascetic, who is dis-identified with the body, then why aren't you liberated already? Remember that the Buddha has been down this road of mortification of the flesh and found it wanting. I think this perspective helps to make sense of what he is saying about ordinary people and the body (which is otherwise a bit paradoxical). The text clearly has broader appeal and application, but it is important to be sensitive to context when interpreting a text, especially where it seems natural to generalise the content.

The ideal disciple -- the sutavā ariyasāvako -- becomes fed-up not with the body but with forms, sensations, apperception, volitions, and cognition; that is with the khandhas, what I call (following Sue Hamilton) the 'apparatus of experience'. Whereas these are usually taken in quite a materialistic way by the Buddhist tradition, Hamilton has convincingly shown them to be collectively concerned with experience, they are the processes by which, or through which we have experiences. So the ideal disciple sees this, becomes fed-up with this whole process, and it is through disillusionment with the processes of experience that they are liberated.

A discourse like this one throws some interesting light on the historicity of the Dharma. It seems to make more sense in a specific context, but we can only imply this. If the implication is wrong, and there is every chance that it is, then it leaves us puzzling over the possibility of ordinary people spontaneously becoming liberated, and the Buddha recommending that if we must believe that something is our self then we should opt for the body as it is more likely to disappoint us in the long run. In the end we have to select the option that makes most sense to us, and follow up to see where it leads. The one thing that a detailed study of Buddhists texts does not supply is certainty about the Buddha's message!

I seldom talk in terms of practice here, but in this case I offer the following way to approach meditation on impermanence from my own practice. It's usual when considering impermanence to take a changing object, or to try to get your head around the "fact" that "everything changes" by seeing everything around you changing. I think these are fair places to start. But in fact many things don't change that much. I've had this coffee cup for a couple of years, and it hasn't changed in that time as far as I can see. I have a B.Sc in chemistry so I know it is changing in ways that I cannot see, but the Buddha didn't know this, didn't have electron microscopes, spectroscopy, or magnetic resonance imaging did he? So when reflecting on impermanence chose an object which does not visibly change for the duration of the meditation. I have lump of quartz I brought with me from New Zealand. Beautiful, but quite inert and probably unchanged for millions of years! What can impermanence mean with respect to this from the point of view of an Iron Age person like the Buddha? And yet when looking at and/or thinking about something relatively unchanging, experiences still come and go. Why is that? [Rhetorical questions]

A second level is to then reflect on how we perceive change. If everything is moving at the same speed (say like inside an aeroplane travelling at 500kph) then we don't perceive things to be moving relative to us (this is the Principle of Relativity). The perception of change requires a reference point. For us, most of the time, it is our sense of 'self'. Change around us is perceived with respect to our sense of continuity. Other people change, and I look older, but inside I'm just the same person. Think of the potency of the phrase "you've changed". But consider that your sense of being a self, your First Person Perspective, is just an experience as well. It has all the features of other experiences, including impermanence. Contra Metzinger, I do believe that if we approach things in the Buddhist way we can get glimpses of this process in action, and that it is liberating.

Yes, people, places and things change, the world changes; but then again we've known this forever. Heraclitus was a contemporary of the Buddha! We need to get beyond this banal observation and see the process of changing experience and our responses to the changing of experience -- to see that mental experience is a feedback loop, where the output immediately becomes input, and generates complexity like the Mandlebrot set. It really does help to have experience of samādhi when trying this, but one can get glimpses without it. So go ahead and consider impermanence in the light of an unchanging object. Let me know if you get enlightened.

~~oOo~~

---

Notes

[1] nominative of assutavant: opposite of sutavant ‘one who has heard; i.e. ‘one who has been taught the Dhamma’, ‘learned’.

[2]ācaya ‘piling up, accumulating’, i.e. accumulating the actions the fruit of which are rebirth; apacaya – opposite of ācaya, i.e. decrease in the possibility of rebirth; ādānaṃ - grasping; nikkhepanaṃ - getting rid of the load.

[3] vassaṃ - literally ‘rain’, i.e. the rainy season. More or less equivalent to a year. Monks counted years of ordination by the number of rainy season retreats they had completed.

[4] aññadeva… aññaṃ. ‘another and another’.

[5] Such as one still finds around the Vulture’s Peak in Rājagaha where I have seen monkeys doing just this! There aren’t any mountains nearby Sāvatthī.

[6] lit: “grasping a branch, having released it grasping another, having released that grasping another” (sākhaṃ gaṇhati, taṃ muñcitvā aññaṃ gaṇhati, taṃ muñcitvā aññaṃ gaṇhati)

[7] Cf AN i.10. “No other single thing can I perceive, monks, that is so changeable as the mind (citta). So much so, monks, that there is no simple simile for how changeable the mind is.” (Nāhaṃ, bhikkhave, aññaṃ ekadhammampi samanupassāmi yaṃ evaṃ lahuparivattaṃ yathayidaṃ cittaṃ. Yāvañcidaṃ, bhikkhave, upamāpina sukarā yāva lahuparivattaṃ cittan’ti.)

[8] ariyasāvako ariya ‘noble’, sāvaka ‘a hearer, someone who has listened to the Dhamma’ synonymous with sutavant.

[9] yoniso manasi karoti cf yoniso-manasikara sometimes ‘wise attention’ but yoniso means ‘according to the origin’ [yoni ‘origin, womb’ with the distributive suffix –so] so the phrase implies paying attention to how things arise, to dependent arising. Yoniso manasi karoti cf yoniso-manasikara sometimes ‘wise attention’ but yoniso means ‘according to the origin’ [yoni ‘origin, womb’ with the distributive suffix –so] so the phrase implies paying attention to how things arise, to dependent arising. See also Yoniso manasi karotha on the Theravādin Blog.

Gautama Buddha : Book Review

I WAS VERY PLEASED to receive a review copy of Vishvapani's (i.e. Viśvapāṇi) new book on the life of of the Buddha. I was involved in several email exchanges with the author during the writing of the book, earning me a mention in the acknowledgements as making "perceptive comments". I also provided a detailed critique of the map provided in the front of the book (more on this below). Vishvapani, a long time member of the Triratna Buddhist Order, is known to listeners of BBC Radio 4 as the Buddhist contributor to Thought for the Day; and edited a previous book: Challenging Times: Stories of Buddhist Practice When Things Get Tough. He has played important roles within the Triratna Movement in publishing, and in communicating change. Vishvapani is an excellent communicator, and so I dived into this book with interest.

An enormous amount of research and effort has gone into this book, as the huge range of texts cited shows. Vishvapani has made himself thoroughly familiar with translations of the Pāli biographical literature, which is no easy thing given how large and yet fragmentary that literature is, and how variable are the translations. The book combines narrative and commentary, if not seamlessly, then at least appropriately and often to good effect, pausing to consider the historicity of various legends. The story is so well known and almost tells itself, though Vishvapani does highlight many details that may have escaped others - particularly in the area of conflicting versions of the story.

This book can be seen as an update of biographies like Ñāṇamoli's The Life of the Buddha which focus on the Pāli Canon as an historical source, but which are almost entirely uncritical. What Vishvapani has tried to do is retell this story for Buddhists, but to inform his retelling with the historical insights of scholars such as Professors Richard Gombrich and Johannes Bronkhorst. For most readers, with little or no access to this kind of scholarship, the book provides valuable perspectives on ancient India. We see that the Buddha's biography is a composed narrative, as opposed to an historical record, and Vishvapani is a Buddhist who is retelling the story for other Buddhists. As such the book retains an element of hagiography; the Buddha is not reduced to a mere human being - human, but not too human - but retains his mystique. I imagine most contemporary Western Buddhists will find the balance between Reason and Romance appealing.

The audience for this book is most likely the average practising Buddhist - someone with a passion for the Buddhist religion, but without much access to Buddhological scholarship. Although Gombrich's most recent book was published at a reasonable price, Bronkhorst's books often exceed £100 and are bought only by University libraries. Barriers to the scholarly literature are many: it requires knowledge of multiple languages (ancient and modern); those who lack training in the various disciplines struggle with the jargon and conceptual frameworks; physical access to primary and secondary sources is often very limited - though Pāli texts and resources are a happy exception with a great deal being available online and for free. The average Buddhist relies on people like Vishvapani to open a window into this world for them. Unfortunately Vishvapani, though highly intelligent, well read, and articulate is not entirely at home in this world - he does not know Pali or Sanskrit for instance - and this has hampered him and lead him into difficulties at times.

The following criticisms are from a point of view which I do not imagine many of Vishvapani's readers will share - but they made considerable impact as I read the book. I was very disappointed to see that, despite my opinion being asked on the subject, that Vishvapani and his publisher had settled on not using diacritics when transliterating Sanskrit (saṃskṛta!) and Pāli. For me this creates an ongoing dissonance and distraction while reading. It certainly detracts from the credibility of the book as a work of scholarship - no bona fide scholar deliberately spells badly! I've published my own books, and I know that it is in fact very easy to include diacritics these days - there really is no excuse any more.

Sometimes Vishvapani's lack of linguistic knowledge shows, for example, when he says of Nirvana [sic] that "it is a verb, not a noun: a way of being rather than a fixed state, and certainly not a place to which one might travel." (p.89) and "...'Nirvana' which is the 'act of blowing out'" (p.94). Nirvāṇa is a past-participle, indicating an action already completed: it literally means 'blown out'; and it can, in fact, be used as a noun or an adjective just the way that another past participle, buddha, is. The act of blowing out - the present indicative - in Sanskrit would be nirvāti; though the causative nirvāpayati might also be used - the root is √vā 'to blow' but there is some overlap with words from √vṛ 'to cover'. C.f. PED sv nibbāna, nibbāti, nibbāpeti, nibbāyati and nibbuta. The metaphor, therefore, is of a state achieved rather than a process in the present: in nirvāṇa the fires of greed, hatred and delusion are 'blown out, extinguished, quenched, snuffed out'; and suffering is eradicated. I can see what Vishvapani was getting at, but if one is going to make doctrinal points through grammar in a serious way, then one needs to know what one is talking about, or consult someone who does. There are a few examples of this type scattered throughout the book.

A further dissonance I experienced was the use of Sanskrit translations of Pāli names throughout. This was made worse by being inconsistent, and by several consistent mis-spellings. So, for instance, despite referring almost exclusively to Pāli sources, the biography is of Gautama (Sanskrit), rather than Gotama (Pāli). And it features characters such as Kashyapa [sic] and Shariputra [sic]. When I encountered the names Adara Kalama and Udraka Reamaputra [sic!] I was initially puzzled until I realised he meant Aḷara Kālāma and Uddaka Rāmaputta. Note that Rāmaputta is not Sanskritised Reamaputra, as Vishvapani has done throughout, but Rāmaputra - ea is not found in any Sanskrit transliteration scheme. Similarly the names of the Buddha's five companions are Sanskritised except Bhaddiya (Sanskrit: Bhadrika) who retains the Pāli form (p.105). Place names were mainly Sanskritised (e.g. Uruvilva for Uruvela, and Rajagriha [sic] for Rājagaha) except Sarnath (Hindi) and Isipatana (Pāli = Sanskrit ṛṣipatana) - though to be fair Sarnath is a modern town without an ancient name.

Other language oddities include using shravaka (i.e. śravaka) and savaka in the same sentence (p.120) and the spelling of the word puthujjana as patthajana which is neither Sanskrit (pṛthagjana) nor Pāli. There is a glossary in the back of the book which enables the reader to find bowdlerised versions of the Pāli names - i.e. without diacritics - but otherwise the reader consulting the sources cited will be confused because the names simply do not match and there is no discussion in the book, anywhere as far as I could see, explaining why. For me this was all very distracting.

The problem here, for the scholar, is that we get no insight into the process or deliberation that has gone on behind the scenes - we get the result of weighing things up, but not enough sense of the measures against which facts are weighed. Although citations to the Pāli sources are frequent (though some are not referenced, bottom of p.123) there are no footnotes which tell us why something has been interpreted one way or another. And although Vishvapani does bring in some of the insights of scholars in the text, we don't really get a sense of the controversy and argumentation that surrounds and suffuses the scholarly discourse. For instance any sense of the intellectual batterings that Bronkhorst has given Gombrich, and Gombrich's elegant ripostes, are absent. Many of these issues are not settled by any means. and Bronkhorst's revisions of Indian history have yet to be tested (though Geoffrey Samuel has independently confirmed many of Bronkhorst's conclusions). I would have expected, at the very least, a justification for translating into Sanskrit when the sources used were overwhelmingly Pāli, and a justification for the lack of diacritics. A separate discussion of the problems of treating Buddhist texts as historical documents would have been a real advantage.

I noticed another, more subtle, problem which plagues Sangharakshita's followers. Early on Sangharaksita, like many other Buddhists of his day, adopted the language of German Idealist philosophy: e.g. 'Transcendental', 'Reality', even 'Absolute Reality', etc., These terms don't really have Pāli or Sanskrit equivalents but came to dominate the way we talk about Buddhism. We are familiar, for instance, with the idea that the Buddha's awakening "transcended language" (p.99), even though almost every sutta speaks of the result of that experience being some form of knowledge, which of course does not transcend language and makes up the content of the scriptures (e.g. at AN 11.2 vimutti is the condition for the arising of vimuttiñāṇa). However more recently Sangharakshita has moved away from that kind of language, and begun talking more in terms of 'experience'. Vishvapani tends to alternate between writing about "the true nature of reality" (p.94) and Gautama's knowledge being a "revelation, not a cool acquisition of knowledge" (p.91); and a more phenomenological language: "Directly confronting his experience was a different kind of challenge from that of attaining mystical states..." (p.73).

Vishvapani is also sometimes ambivalent about aspects of the story when there are variations in the texts: the forest, for example, is both a frightening and dangerous place (p.73ff) and a peaceful retreat (p. 100). Perhaps it was both, but the two ideas need sorting out and some commentary to resolve what seemed to me to be an obvious contradiction.

There were one or two instances of Buddhist-speak. When Vishvapani writes that Bahiya was instructed "to focus on direct, unmediated perception" (p.12), I found myself wondering what that could possibly mean. It's the sort of statement that used to go under my radar, but now I realise that I don't understand such language, and never have. What's worse is that, as I understand the processes of perception, there could be no such thing as 'unmediated perception' - perception is mediation. My own exploration of the Bahiya Sutta goes in an entirely different conceptual direction (In the Seen. 22 May 2009).

I mentioned the map in the beginning of the book, and this also has problems. Sarnath and Vāraṇāsi are, contra the picture the map gives, very close together and on the same side of the Gomati River. The Ganges River does not cease at the confluence with the Yamuna! Perhaps I would not be complaining, but I was specifically consulted on this matter. For instance I said:

"Bodhgayā is on the western bank of the Falgu/Narañjanā. And these days is just a little south of the fork in the river (and on the western fork). Took me a while to figure out Uruvilva (aka Uruvela!) - is there a reason to think it is not Bodhgayā? My impression is of two names for one place (since the name Bodhgayā is not mentioned in Pāli AFAIK). "

The map is probably intended to give a broad overview, but some of these problems - like the 200 mile gap in the Ganges River caused no doubt by an opaque background for the word 'Varanasi' - could easily have been corrected. Such things matter to me.

I'm quite aware that these criticisms will be seen as nit-picking by most of Vishvapani's readers, and perhaps by the author himself. But nitpicking of this type is what I do - these are the kinds of comments I was making in my emails to Vishvapani during the writing process. I'm not a style guru, or a literary critic - I'm a philologist. I'm very much concerned with accurately conveying what's in the early sources, in light of contemporary scholarship, in order to show how these sources contribute to a modern understanding of Buddhism. My perception is that Vishvapani was engaged in something similar with this book, so I do think my criticisms are relevant and valid. I wanted very much to like this book, Vishvapani is a friend and colleague. But in the end if found the constant pricking of the kinds of difficulties outlined above left me feeling more frustrated than pleased. This has not been an easy review to write!

I imagine that for those who know no Pali or Sanskrit, and who have no access to the recent Buddhological scholarship, that this book will be very well received. The reviews on Amazon UK, one by a fellow order member, are so far glowing. It fills a gap in the market for a considered retelling of the life of the Buddha in a modern idiom, concerned to communicate to a relatively sophisticated contemporary Buddhist readership. I think Vishvapani knows his audience pretty well, and speaks to them. And to be fair I'm not really a member of the intended audience. Despite my criticisms I respect the care and thought that has gone into the book over a period of years. As far as I can judge, and apart from the negative points I have made, the book is well written - Vishvapani's 'voice' is serious and thoughtful, though never pedantic (more's the pity!). The many citations will allow readers to consult the translations themselves (allowing for the confusions caused by the sometimes inconsistent Sanskritization), and since he mainly sticks to recent, currently in-print translations these should be easily accessible to those who care to go looking (all of them are on my bookshelf). I think the price of £25 for the hardback, handsome though it is, will have put off many of his target audience, but once a more affordable paperback edition comes out I expect that it will become a popular and widely read book.

Vishvapani Blomfield.
Gautama Buddha: The Life and Teachings of the Awakened One.
Quercus, 2011.
ISBN: 978 1 84916 409 2.
388 p.
RRP £25.

~~oOo~~

31/5/11 I note that my 'frank' review has provoked a response from Elisa Freschi on reviews more generally (see also the comments).

Svastika

THE URBAN MYTH that the Nazi swastika goes one way, but the sacred symbol of India goes the other way seems to still be current. Sadly, this is not true. The official National Socialist Worker's Party emblem, adopted in 1932, was the clockwise swastika, and this is often seen on Buddhist images as well. Jains even use the rotated svastika. Both clockwise and anticlockwise are used in Indian religious iconography, and both are found, for instance, in the Tibetan Unicode block: U+0FD5 卐 (right-facing/clockwise), U+0FD6 卍 (left-facing/anti-clockwise). The svastika is also a Chinese character, and is pronounced wàn. If you look at Google maps of Japan you'll see temples marked with the 卍.

In the Western world the swastika - the lucky symbol of India - seems indelibly associated with Nazism. Articles entitled "The Swastika and X" continue to be produced, and all of them examine aspects of Nazi Germany. There's some irony here as the Germans did not call it a swastika but a hakenkreuz 'hook cross' and elsewhere it is referred to as a Greek Cross. In China the association of the symbol with the Falungong movement has caused the Chinese government to react against it as well. [1]

Perhaps because of the Nazi connection in the early 20th century, it seems that Victorian Era sources are largely responsible for forming our views of the symbol. Most sources seem to recycle opinions first articulated in the mid to late 19th Century. In researching the subject I turned up a reference to Cunningham (1854) in The Migration of Symbols, by the wonderfully named Eugène Goblet d'Alviella (1894, but still in print) which also refers to a letter Max Müller wrote to Henry Schliemann and was published in Schliemann's book Ilios (1880). [2] These sources, with Monier-Williams's Sanskrit English Dictionary, seem to account for most of what's on the Internet in English. Note that the Oxford English Dictionary suggests it came into use in English only in 1871, but Cunningham (1854) trumps this, and this is a rare case of the OED being wrong!

Despite the negative association in modern times the bent cross symbol appears in many disparate cultures around the world, and throughout history. The symbol is found in Indus Valley seals for instance (pre 1700 BCE), and has been used by Indigenous North Americans, and pre-Christian Europeans including Greeks and Celts. Goblet d'Alviella (1894) seems to see the ubiquity of the symbol as evidence of a single ur-culture that migrated around the world. Many explanations are found for the symbol - that it is a solar symbol, perhaps via a wheel symbol; that it originates in weaving societies, etc. In India, by the time we have good records for it, the svastika is simply a superstitious lucky symbol with no definite underlying symbolism.

The Wikipedia swastika page perpetuates another urban myth about the svastika that can be traced to General Sir Alexander Cunningham via the Monier-Williams Dictionary (1899). MW says s.v. svastika (p.1283a):

"...according to the late Sir A. Cunningham it has no connexion with sun-worship but its shape represents a monogram or interlacing of the letters of the auspicious words in the Aśoka characters."

MW supplies no reference for this claim, but it is repeated across the Internet, and in a variety of otherwise reputable sources. A bit of detective work shows that Cunningham, later the first director of the Archaeological Survey of India, makes the claim in: The Bhilsa Topes (1854). Cunningham, surveyed the great stupa complex at Sanchi in 1851, where he famously found caskets of relics labelled 'Sāriputta' and 'Mahā Mogallāna'. [3] The Bhilsa Topes records the features, contents, artwork and inscriptions found in and around these stupas. All of the inscriptions he records are in Brāhmī script. What he says, in a note on p.18, is:

"The swasti of Sanskrit is the suti of Pali; the mystic cross, or swastika is only a monogrammatic symbol formed by the combination of the two syllables, su + ti = suti."

There are two problems with this.

1. 
   While there is a word suti in Pali it is equivalent to Sanskrit śruti 'hearing'. The Pali equivalent of svasti is sotthi; and svastika is either sotthiya or sotthika. Cunningham is simply mistaken about this.
2. The two letters su + ti in Brāhmī script are not much like the svastika. This can easily been seen in the accompanying image on the right, where I have written the word in the Brāhmī script. I've included the Sanskrit and Pali words for comparison. Cunningham's imagination has run away with him.

Below are two examples of donation inscriptions from the south gate of the Sanchi stupa complex taken from Cunningham's book (plate XLX, p.449). Note that both begin with a lucky svastika.

The top line reads 卐 vīrasu bhikhuno dānaṃ - i.e. "the donation of Bhikkhu Vīrasu." The lower inscription also ends with dānaṃ, and the name in this case is perhaps pānajāla (I'm unsure about jā). Professor Greg Schopen has noted that these inscriptions recording donations from bhikkhus and bhikkhunis seem to contradict the traditional narratives of monks and nuns not owning property or handling money. The last symbol on line 2 apparently represents the three jewels, and frequently accompanies such inscriptions.

The word svasti (स्वस्ति) is a feminine noun probably deriving from su- + asti: where su- is a prefix cognate with the European eu- meaning 'good, well, excellent' and asti is from the verb √as 'to be'. Perhaps through constant use the word asti, originally the 3rd person singular present of √as, came be an indeclinable particle meaning 'existent, being'. Sandhi rules mean that su+asti becomes svasti which means 'well-being', and is used in the sense of 'auspicious, good fortune, luck, success, and prosperity'. In other words svasti is rooted in ancient Indian superstition. Note that in all modern transliterations of Sanskrit व is written va. So how do we come to spell our word swastika with a 'w'? There could be for two reasons: firstly modern Hindi and other North India IE languages transliterate व as wa, and we could be taking the word not from Sanskrit, but from Hindi; secondly Cunningham (back in 1854) was transliterating Sanskrit व as wa as well and other Victorians might have followed suit. The suffix -ka is adjectival and so svastika (स्वस्तिक) should mean something like 'related to well-being'. However in this form we would normally expect the root vowel to change to its strongest (vṛddhi) grade svāstika, and this does not happen in this case.

Müller (in Schliemann, p.346-7) notes that svasti occurs throughout 'the Veda' [sic; presumably he means the Ṛgveda where it appears a few dozen times]. It occurs both as a noun meaning 'happiness', and an adverb meaning 'well' or 'hail'. Müller suggests it would correspond to Greek εὐστική (eustikē) from εὐστώ (eustō), however neither form occurs in my Greek Dictionaries. Though svasti occurs in the Ṛgveda, svastika does not. Müller traces the earliest occurrence of svastika to Pāṇini's grammar, the Aṣṭādhyāyī, in the context of ear markers for cows to show who their owner was. Pāṇini discusses a point of grammar when making a compound using svastika and karṇa, the word for ear. I've seen no earlier reference to the word svastika, though the symbol itself was in use in the Indus Valley civilisation.

Müller says that the svastika only refers to the right-facing cross 卐, while the left-facing cross 卍 is called sauvastika, and incidentally does not believe that the symbol is a monogram (Schliemann p.347). [4] The form sauvastika doesn't make sense to me. If the root vowel underwent vṛddhi (a > ā) then the word would be svāstika; but there are a number of words in MW which have this change: sva > sauva. If it is su undergoing vṛddhi (prior to combining with asti) then the form ought to be sāvasti (su > sau and au + a > āva). If sauvasti is the vṛddhi form, then we'd expect the weakest grade to be suvasti, but it is not. Others also insist on this difference between the two forms, but my impression of looking at Buddhist art is that no differentiation is made by artists. The BBC h2g2 webpage on svastika suggests that the distinction between svastika and sauvastika only dates from the 19th century, though the claim is not referenced. Sauvastika occurs in Sanskrit dictionaries, but not in relation to the symbol - a sauvastika according to Boehtlingk is a Hauspriester eines Fürsten 'The house priest of a prince'. MW suggests 'benedictive, salutary; family Brahmin'.

I would end by saying that the svastika is an element of pan-Indian superstition - a lucky sign. As such we should probably not mourn too much that it was taken over by the Nazis and given an indelibly negative connotation in the West. As modern, Western Buddhists we don't need lucky symbols, and we don't rely on luck. We practice. The svastika is really of historical interest only and there is no pressing need to rehabilitate it. 

~~oOo~~

Notes

1. Craig S. Smith, "In China's Religious Crackdown, An Ancient Symbol Gets the Boot," Wall Street Journal 8 September 1999, p. B1;
2. The relevant page references in the online version of Goblet d'Alviella (1894) are incorrect. I have located printed copies in the Cambridge University Library, and supplied correct references in this article.
3. This story is well recounted in Allen (2002) - see esp. p.214f. I recommend this book. I gather from a brief conversation I had with Charles, last year at a lecture by Prof. Gombrich, that his next book will be on King Aśoka which I'm eager to read.
4. Goblet d'Alviella (1894, p. 46) appears to use Müller's remarks to contradict Cunningham, but in Schliemann (1880) Müller specifically refers to the Sanskrit spelling, not the supposed Pali of Cunningham. So the two statements are not really connected.

Bibliography

• Allen, Charles. (2002) The Buddha and the Sahibs. London : John Murray.
• Cunningham, Alexander. (1854) The Bhilsa topes, or, Buddhist monuments of central India : comprising a brief historical sketch of the rise, progress, and decline of Buddhism; with an account of the opening and examination of the various groups of topes around Bhilsa. London : Smith, Elder. [possibly the earliest recorded use of the word swastika in English].
• Goblet d'Alviella, E. (1894) The Migration of Symbols. London: A. Constable and Co. Online: http://www.sacred-texts.com/sym/mosy/index.htm
• Monier-Williams, Monier. (1899) A Sanskrit-English dictionary : etymologically and philologically arranged with special reference to cognate Indo-European languages. [New ed. greatly enlarged and improved with the collaboration of E. Leumann, C. Cappeller and other scholars.] Asian Education Services : New Delhi, 2008.
• Schliemann, Henry. (1880). Ilios : the city and country of the Trojans : the results of researches and discoveries on the site of Troy and through the Troad in the years 1871-72-73-78-79. London : John Murray.

See Also

Gary A. David. The Four Arms of Destiny: Swastikas in the Hopi World & Beyond.

Buddha Day

IN THE TRIRATNA MOVEMENT, like many other Buddhist groups, we celebrate the Buddha's awakening about now, to coincide with the 2nd full moon after the Vernal Equinox. We call this festival Buddha Day, and it is trined with Dharma Day, two full moons later in July, and Sangha Day in November (a non-traditional date I think). I note that my local centre is celebrating Wesak this year instead of Buddha Day, and that Wesak has been creeping into our vocabulary. To my consternation I note that our main website has Wesak as the name of this festival as well.

The word buddha is, of course, the past-participle of the verbal root √budh 'to understand, to wake up'. It's often said that Buddha is a title, but in fact it is a description. In calling Gautama 'the Buddha' we are saying that he is someone who has woken up or understood. On Buddha Day we celebrate the fact of his having woken up.

Wesak, usually pronounced with wes to rhyme with 'mess' by English speakers, is the Sinhalese (corrupt) pronunciation of the Pali name of the 2nd lunar month of the ancient Indian calendar. In Sanskrit it is vaiśākha, and in Pali vesākha. The full title should be in Sanskrit vaiśākha-pūrṇimā and in Pali vesākha-puṇṇamī. The name itself has little spiritual significance. Vaiśākha means 'connected with visākha' and visākha means 'branched or forked' from vi- (divided, originally from dvi 'two') and sākha (a branch). And pūrṇimā means 'full moon.' So it just means the full moon day of the second lunar month, in an archaic calender that called the Spring Equinox New Year.

Most South-East Asian countries follow the Sinhalese by calling the festival some phonetic variant of the Pali vesākha. Burma, apparently, uses their own name for the same lunar month: Kason. The rest of the Buddhist world which celebrates the festival usually opt for a local name. In Japan it is hanamatsuri (花祭), literally 'flower festival'. In Tibet they say sagé dawa (sa ga'i zla ba ས་གའི་ཟླ་བ) which is also just the name of the lunar month in which the festival occurs, though their calendar is a bit different. And so on.

So there's nothing special or particularly significant about the name Wesak. The direct equivalent would be calling our festival "May Full Moon"or just "May", and mispronouncing the words slightly.

In India two different Sanskrit terms are used. 1. buddha-pūrṇimā 'Buddha full moon' - where pūrṇimā, again, means 'full moon'; and 2. buddha-jayantī 'the Buddha's victory', where jayantī means 'victorious'. I'm not sure why the feminine is used, but it clearly comes from the present participle jayanta 'victorious' of the verb √ji 'to conquer'. These two at least have the advantage of stating explicitly that they celebrate Gautama having awakened, and jayantī is really quite descriptive. The festival celebrates the Buddha's victory over dukkha ( or death, or Māra, etc.), and it just happens to be on the full moon day of the second lunar month of the old Indian calendar because that's the traditional date.

Calling the festival Buddha Day, as opposed to one or other of the Asian Buddhist terms, was doubtless part of Sangharakshita's conscious break with traditional Buddhism in the late 1960s. In a recent communique to the Triratna Movement he said:

The Triratna Buddhist Order and Community is not a continuation of the Tibetan tradition, or of any other particular Buddhist tradition. The particular iconographic, theoretical, and ritual frameworks of Tibetan or other traditions are not our reference point. This should be plain from the imagery, ceremonies, and rhetoric in common use in the Triratna Buddhist Community.

When I asked him what he though about this creep towards using Wesak he replied:

"So far as I am concerned, it is Buddha Day, to correspond with Dharma Day and Sangha Day. I don’t know how the term Wesak has crept in. It was, however, in common use among English Buddhists, mainly Theravadins, many years ago. I think the Buddhist Society still uses the term."

It's been suggested to me, in a discussion about this issue on Facebook, that one of reasons for using Wesak is that everyone is doing it. And yet for four decades we have been critical of this kind of group-think, of doing things just to fit in. I don't find this reasoning very convincing. It's clear that we are celebrating the Buddha's enlightenment, and not any particular traditional observance.

I've given some thought to this matter and have wondered whether the drift into using a traditional title for the festival is symptomatic of the commodification and commoditization of Buddhism. Commodification is the process of assigning monetary value to something that has previously been priceless: a move from social value to market value. This is one of the most potent forces in Western society at present - so that we truly are in a position these days to know 'the price of everything and the value of nothing' (Oscar Wilde. Lord Darlington, Act III). Commoditization on the other hand is when a different brands of a product become indistinguishable to the consumer. This tends to cancel out decisions based on features and causes consumers to decide on price - often leading to price wars.

If you go to a good book store they will have several dozen books on Buddhism, not to mention CDs and DVDs. Old classics go out of print and an endless stream of new books come out each year. Few of them add much to the gene pool. Most recycle what are becoming clichés. At the same time Buddhism is repackaged as lifestyle advice and sold under various guises. Although some centres operate on a donation basis, most of us have mortgages to pay, so our classes cost money. Of itself this is not necessarily a bad thing. But there is little in the popular imagination to distinguish what we do, from what the local Yoga centre, or the local Mindfulness centre do. The market for meditation and wisdom teachings is becoming commodified. This is fuelled by monism - the belief that all spiritual traditions aim at one truth, that beneath the surface "all is one", and all religions are essentially the same. I don't think price, more than distinctive teachings, drives choices about which tradition we get involved with, but I do think things like physical proximity and convenient opening hours do.

On one hand perhaps some of us buy into the 'all is one' meme, and just want to get along with everyone? Perhaps we don't feel so confident these days and seek safety in numbers? Perhaps we ourselves have lost a sense of our distinctiveness, or perhaps we are afraid that in asserting our distinctiveness we risk rejection by traditional Buddhists (with more accusations of arrogance)? Perhaps we just are not really individuals in the full sense, and are too easily swayed by the popular.

On the other hand the best response to a commoditized market place is to increase the value of the product - so most of our centres offer a range of services. In addition to more or less secular meditation courses, as well as basic classes on Buddhism, and more in-depth and explicitly Buddhist instruction, we teach Hatha Yoga, Tai Chi, Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction. You also get access to a community of like minded individuals. And of course part of community life is collective practice and celebrations.

So the response and the situation are both complex. And I don't mean to suggest or imply that Triratna Buddhists knowingly or willingly pursue commodification and commoditization - I think the opposite is true, we generally resist it. It's happening around us though, and because it is the mindset of the wider society, we can't help but be influenced to some extent. Most of the people we interact with tacitly support this kind of change because it means that they are materially better off, at least in the short term. We probably unconsciously participate simply by being members of a particular kind of society and culture. I think it's important that we be aware of this trend and resist it. But we also need to resist the blending in and settling down tendency. Our movement began as an explicit break with tradition. We need to be wary of treating tradition as a fall back. Falling back on tradition would be a disaster for us.

And I think adopting the name Wesak is a bit like this. It's not the result of a conscious consensus to change. There's been no discussion about it. We're expressing a sense of lack, or even, from what some people say, a sense of discomfort or even dislike. I'm playing this up a bit to make a point. But also I happen to be in contact with a number of people, almost none of whom are part of our movement, who are very excited about breaking with tradition. They call themselves 'secular Buddhists', or even 'non-Buddhists', and they write wonderful searing polemics of tradition. Forty years ago what Sangharakshita did was radical and caused a stir in the establishment; and yes, even some hatred. His polemics made him very unpopular in some circles (e.g. Forty-Three Years Ago, and Was the Buddha a Bhikkhu?) Right now that same attitude is becoming hot. Once we were the world leaders in this, now we appear to be choosing to fit in. I was attracted to the Triratna Community for many reasons, not least of which was that it was and is a community. But I also liked the zeitgeist, the zeal and zest, as well as the idealism and ideals. I wanted to believe. 18 years on I'm older and more cynical, and perhaps a little wiser.

I hope I'm not merely being cynical in criticising the use of Wesak. It's not a name that speaks to me the way that Buddha Day does. Some of my friends feel differently and it occurred to me that public holidays here in the UK are rather prosaically named. In New Zealand we have Waitangi Day, ANZAC Day, The Queen's Birthday, Labour Day which are full of meaning and history for us. "The May Bank Holiday" doesn't ring any bells for me, while Buddha Day is familiar territory. For Brits it's the other way around.

If I thought anyone would take any notice, I would suggest we have it on the same date each year, the way that Shingon Buddhists celebrate Kūkai's birth on the 15th of June (15th day of the 6th month in the Japanese lunar calendar); or, say, on the second Sunday of May each year. Make a clean break of it. However we seem to be sentimental about the archaic Indian lunar calendar, even when we have almost no comprehension of it. I have to confess that every fact I cite about it here is recently looked up for the purposes of writing this.

The second full moon after the Vernal Equinox of 2011 is on Tuesday 17th May, and that is when I will be celebrating Buddha Day - the Triratna Movement festival celebrating the the Awakening of the Awakened One.

~~oOo~~