Non-lexical utterances, stobhas, and mantra

In researching the background to Buddhist mantra I inevitably began to read about Vedic mantra. There is a lot more research on Vedic mantra and on the whole it is more interesting than research on Buddhist mantra, so far. Reading up on the Vedic tradition has given me an appreciation of the Vedic literature which is of surpassing beauty and profundity at times. I think we Buddhists tend to write off the other Indian scriptures but that is our loss. The Vedic tradition stands in relation to Indian culture rather like the Ancient Greeks do to Europe.

If you do read up on Vedic mantras you will find that mantra originally meant one of the hymns to the gods as exemplified and recorded in the Ṛgveda. The date of this text is disputed rather vigorously and sometimes hotly, but it seems likely that it was compiled around 1500-1200 BCE, probably out of an already existing oral literature. As the verses (or ṛk) began to be used ritually two things happened. Firstly an exegetic literature began to be composed to explain how, where, and when to use the verses in the rituals; and secondly the verses themselves were reframed. For my purpose today I want to draw attention to the Sāmaveda which reframes the Ṛgvedic verses by setting them to music. Verses sung or chanted to these rhythms and tunes as called sāman.

One of the key features of sāmans is the insertion of syllables to alter the metre of the original. These syllables are called stobha. Stobha can be one or two syllables. One list of stobha is:

ā (e)re hā-u is phat as hā hṃ iṭ pnya auhovā hahas ho-i kāhvau um bhā hai hum kit up dada hā-i hup mṛ vava (e)bṛ ham hvau nam vo-I (e)rā has ihi om (Staal Vedic Mantras p.61)

Recently I was revisiting some websites about the sounds that people make during conversations - which the researchers call "non-lexical utterances" or "conversational grunts". The interest in these sounds came out of research into human-computer interfaces. Here is a list of non-lexical utterances on one site:

ai hh-aaaah iiyeah okay nuuuuu ukay uam uumm yeahh am hhh m-hm okay-hh nyaa-haao um uh uun yeahuuh neeu ao hhh-uuuh mm ooa nyeah um-hm-uh-hm uh-hn uuuh yegh nuu aoo hhn mm-hm ookay o-w umm uh-hn-uh-hn uuuuuuu yeh-yeah ohh aum hmm mm-mm oooh oa ummum uh-huh wow yei yeah eah hmmmmm mmm ooooh oh unkay uh-mm yah-yeah yo ehh hn myeah oop-ep-oop oh-eh unununu uh-uh ye yyeah achh h-nmm hn-hn nn-hn u-kay oh-kay uu uh-uhmmm yeah ah haah huh nn-nnn u-uh oh-okay uuh uhh yeah-okay ahh hh i nu u-uun oh-yeah uum uhhh yeah-yeah (Reponsive Systems Project)

The list could be supplemented from popular music (think James Brown for instance!), or for that matter from serious vocal music, which also use non-lexical syllables to pad sentences or verses to fit a metre. These non-lexical sounds function as feedback to the speaker, and are uttered in concert with the speaker in order to let them know that they are being heard and understood. A lot (but not all) of the information conveyed by these non-lexical sounds is contained in the prosodic aspects of speech - tone of voice, inflection - along with non-verbal signals such as facial expression, hand gestures, and body posture. These can indicate the attitude of the listener to what is being said, and how they feel about it.

While we cannot confirm this, it seems reasonable to surmise that stobhas were drawn from non-lexical sounds amongst Vedic speakers at the time. This further suggests that stobhas not only help a verse to conform to a metre or rhythm, but may also have served another pragmatic function when chanted in sāmans. They may have been imitating prosodic elements of speakers of the time, incorporating information about responses to the sāman within it. It may be possible for a suitably qualified person to test this idea.

It is the conclusion of some researchers into mantra, Fritz Staal being the leading light, that because mantra contain non-lexical sounds, that they are "meaningless". We would have to agree that sounds like oṃ, āḥ, and hūṃ do not have dictionary definitions, they do not refer to any "thing". However it's clear that Staal et al have been too narrowly focussed on semantics. Languistics may be focussed on words, but human communication involves very much more, and a great deal of communication may take place without any words at all. We can even make words mean the opposite of their dictionary meanin: I can say "I like your new haircut", while implying the exact opposite in an unequivocal way through the use of facial expression and vocal inflection for instance. (This is known technically as conversational implicature)

After the Ṛgvedic period mantras began to make more use of non-lexical sounds. Staal sees this as a persistence of primitive pre-linguistic sounds into the present: they are like bird song, animal noises, or the burbling of infants, and quite meaningless. They are the caveman grunts of popular imagination, retained by Indian religious leaders for ritual purposes. If we for a moment accept Staal's hypothesis his analysis of those kinds of sounds is grossly oversimplified since all three of these phenomena are far from meaningless if one knows how to listen. Worse still Staal appears to be making some unfortunate, rather "orientalist", implications about the subjects of his studies. This inelegant hypothesis is untestable, and does not open the way to further research. It certainly does not chime with the experience of mantra. Kūkai goes to the other extreme and counts every mantric syllable as being infinitely meaningful, and being the starting point for elucidating all knowledge and experience. In this he is adopting a world view which has its basis in the Avataṃsaka Sūtra. A full explanation of Kūkai idea deserves it's own essay, and goes beyond what I am suggesting here. Not that I disagree, but I am looking for intermediate steps that make sense in a contemporary context.

Stobhas used in sāmans may well have been the model for the use of non-lexical syllables in mantra although this would be difficult to prove. They do bear a resemblance to non-lexical sounds used meaningfully in conversation by contemporary English speakers (and others). But even if they did not what it suggests to me is that we can look for meaning in ways that might not be obvious, and still not have to stray into metaphysics and mysticism. It may be that no explanation in these terms can fully comprehend mantra. That is not a problem. But in attempting such an explanation I think we can shed a lot more light on this subject, and make it more accessible in the process. The "mantras are meaningless" mantra is a dead end as far as research goes, and as far as elucidating the persistence of mantra over several millennia in Indian religious contexts.



References

• The responsive systems project. [website]
  
• The divākīrtya sāmans. mAnasa-taraMgiNI [blog]
  
• Staal, F. 1989. "Vedic Mantras" in Alper, H. P. (ed) Mantra. Albany : State University of New York Press.

image: The Reading Genie - "Say ah!"

Mantra, Magic, and Interconnectedness.

At the heart of the practice of mantra is the idea that everything is interconnected. Although the idea is not apparent in early Buddhist teachings it is strongly associated with the Mahāyāna Avataṃsaka Sūtra, and with the Buddhism that centres around it, often known by the Chinese equivalent: Huayen. The Avataṃsaka coalesced in the 3rd century though it is thought to be a composite work that accumulated parts over time. However the idea that everything is interconnected was not new to India at the time, but goes back to the earliest religious text: the Ṛg Veda.

In the Vedas the cosmos is divided into three realms: human, god, and intermediate or sky. The earliest gods were personifications of the awesome forces of nature: the sun, storms, and fire... The ancients believed, for instance, that a single principle linked all things which were hot or bright: the sun, fire, digestion, and even the spark of imagination. This particular principle was called Agni - sometimes referred to as the "god" of fire. Even in our technologically advanced times we are still subject to nature (think global warming!): how much more so were our ancient forebears! They desired control over the sun and the monsoons, and developed a kind of magic technology for doing so. The very early Vedic poets acted as shamans who were directly in contact with the gods and the Vedic hymns are records of their conversations with the gods, or their prayers to them. They became the keepers of the the sacred fire. The Agni was the hermetic messenger and fire was an exchange medium: sacrifices were transformed by the fire into smoke, and this was carried upwards to the gods who could consume it in that form. In return the gods were compelled to respond favourably.

The key to effective rituals was the "bandhu" or connection between this world and the god realm. By manipulating the bandhu at this end, changes could be wrought at the other end. The priests were masters of the bandhu, and a great deal of the vast exegetical literature on the Vedas is devoted to listing or explaining bandhu. As with many ancient cultures knowledge at this time was based on resemblance and relationship; our own approach to knowledge relies on difference and isolation. A bandhu worked because something in this world resembled something in the other world. It can be difficult for us moderns to understand this, as we are attuned to seeing differences. To the ancients a metaphor might have seemed far more substantial for instance: they would never have said, as we might, that it's "just a metaphor". They understood the concept of metaphor, but took the relationship to be far more substantial than we do.

The late Vedic period saw the internalisation of the rituals, which were then carried out in imagination - thereby inventing meditation. The Buddha was born into this time, and studied for a time with Late Vedic sages, known as śramaṇas. The Buddha explicitly rejected the various forms of Vedic ritual, both external and internal, and substituted his own practices which emphasise a balance of blissful tranquillity and penetrating insight. Although he taught that all experiences arise from causes, he did not make the link between all experiences to explicitly talk about interconnectedness.

By the 3rd century some Buddhists were using the kinds of images of interconnectedness that have become familiar - Indra's net of jewels which each reflect all of the others for instance. In the 6th century a great synthesis of religious ideas occurred, partly in response to a breakdown in social and political order as the Gupta Empire was smashed by the Huns. Many of the old Vedic ideas were assimilated into Buddhism and key amongst these was the idea of bandhu. One sees this, for instance, in the Tantric explanation of the Avalokiteśvara mantra. The syllables are not considered as linguistic units, but as representing the six realms of existence, and the six manifestations of the Bodhisattva in those realms, etc.

It can be difficult for us to see how this medieval Indian idea makes sense. In "The End of Magic" Ariel Glucklich describes his research amongst the Tantric magicians of present day Benares. Working through the various Western ideological explanations of magic he rejects them all in favour of an explanation which relies on a sense of interconnectedness. Having done field work amongst Tantric healers in Banares, Glucklich concludes that:

Magic is based on a unique type of consciousness: the awareness of the interrelatedness of all things in the world by means of simple but refined sense perception... magical actions... constitute a direct, ritual way of restoring the experience of relatedness in cases where that experience has been broken by disease, drought, war, or any number of other events. (The End Of Magic, p.12)

I think that Glucklich has had a penetrating insight in this statement and one that we can relate back to Tantric Buddhism generally. Crucially to my mind he insists that what he calls the magical experience is neither a mystical nor a metaphysical concept.

It is a natural phenomenon, the product of our evolution as a human species and an acquired ability for adapting to various ecological and social environments. (The End Of Magic, p.12)

Some work remains to be done to adapt Glucklich's work to the Buddhist context: we need to see it in the light of Buddhist psychology for instance, and the Buddhist view of reality and experience; and we also need to make clear how mantra works in this framework. I am confident that it can be done because at the heart of the matter is interrelatedness.


Reference

• Glucklich, Ariel. The end of magic. New York, Oxford University Press, 1997.

image: my Facebook "friend wheel"

Persian Influences on Indian Buddhism

Some people will be aware that when Buddhism flowed out of India it went West as well as East. The huge Buddha statues at Bamiyan in Afghanistan are a result of this, as are, apparently the Arabian Nights stories which are based to some extent on the Jataka tales. But few people will know that there was some traffic in the other direction.

It should come as no surprise really. The Khyber Pass continues to be the main route into and out of Pakistan in the North-west. But the evidence for this inflowing of traffic is all rather sketchy. I want to discuss two main items here: the presence of Babylonian Omens in the Dīgha Nikāya; and aspects of the Arapacana Alphabet.

Some years ago now the late Professor David Pingree noticed that the first sutta of the Dīgha Nikāya, the Brahmajāla Sutta, contained a list of omens. The context is that the Buddha is spelling out to the bhikkhus that he considers divination and the interpreting of omens as wrong livelihood for a bhikkhu. The reasons for this are not clear but I suspect that it was one of many ways in which the Buddhist sangha tried to make itself distinctive from a. laymen, and b. ascetics from other traditions. The interesting feature of this list is that in both form and content it very closely resembles a Babylonian omen manual preserved in cuneiform writing in what is now Iran. Professor Pingree closely compares the items on the two lists and the order in which they appear and concludes that they are practically identical. Now we know the date of the cuneiform writing since it is pushed into clay and it very definitely pre-dates Buddhism in India. It's widely known amongst historians, and largely overlooked by Buddhists, that the Achaemanid Empire was in control of much of what is now Pakistan at the time of the Buddha (even allowing for the disputes over his dates). Interestingly the Pāli commentaries tell us that kings of Magadha used to send their sons to Taxila to be educated in administration and other disciplines, and Taxila at the time was a Persian enclave. At some point one or other of these young nobles must have either returned with the knowledge of these omens, or with someone else possessed it. Another scholar speculates that the Buddha's father employed Chaldean (ie Persian) magicians though I think this is not supported by the evidence.

The Achaemanids were defeated and their empire destroyed by Alexander the Great whose own empire did not outlive it's creator by very long. It took a few generations for the Persians to regroup. By the time the Sassanian Persians were starting to make their presence felt, Gāndhāra had become one of the most important centres for Buddhist innovation and inspiration. The Persians by this time had abandoned the elaborate cuneiform script and begun to use a form of Aramaic. It is this Aramaic script which forms the basis for the earliest known Indian script: Kharoṣṭhī. Kharoṣṭhī is written right to left, and it has several characters in common (and with the same phonetic value) as Aramaic. It also only has one sign for initial vowels which is modified using diacritic marks to produce the full range of Indian vowels. This is because the Semitic Languages which employ Aramaic scripts do not allow words to begin with a vowel. The vowel sign in Kharoṣṭhī is modelled on, and is used like, a consonant. This is interesting in itself since Gāndhāra is probably the place where writing was first used in India, and it is one of the places where Buddhists first began to write down sutras.

Richard Salomon has shown with some certainty that the Arapacana alphabet is simply the Gāndhāri alphabet. He has hinted (to me in an email) that he knows why it is in the order that it is, which is different from other Indian alphabets, but as yet has not published his thoughts on this. One of the things about the Arapacana alphabet is that it is frequently associated with a series of verses in which a keyword starting with each letter of the alphabet either begins the line, or features prominently in it. Although the Indians did impose meter on their writings very commonly, and although collections of verses, such as the Vedas or the suttas in the Saṃyutta Nikāya, are arranged numerically, I am not aware of any other alphabetical list. But there are a number of Manichean hymns and Hebrew Psalms which are. So it seems as though the Arapacana was influenced by Semitic ideas via the Persians. What is more Jan Nattier has observed that the Arapacana verses are the earliest verses associated with the word "dhāraṇī", and could in fact be the original dhāraṇī. It is obvious that the alphabetical verses were a mnemonic aid, and so this accords with what is said about dhāraṇīs later. Actually it is interesting to note that most dhāraṇīs serve no obvious mnemonic function, and the association with memory is just a conceptual legacy. The conclusion here is that Persian influences were behind the creation and adoption of dhāraṇīs by Buddhists in Gāndhāra. I cannot prove this, but it is one explanation which fits the known facts.

The contact between India and the West, especially via the Khyber Pass is underplayed I think. More research might turn up more evidence of the cultural exchanges that took place and the way they shaped Buddhism over the years. It will reinforce the nascent realisation that Buddhism was not so different from other Indian religions in it's assimilation of ideas, concepts, and practices from the others.

Further Reading

Nattier, J. 2000. A few good men. (University of Hawaii Press)

Pingree, David.

• 1963. Astronomy and Astrology in India and Iran. Isis. vol.54 (2), p.229-246.
• 1998. Legacies in astronomy and celestial omens in The Legacy of Mesopotamia (Oxford University Press,) p.125-137
• 1991. Mesopotamian omens in Sanskrit paper presented at La Circulation des biens, des personnes et des idées dans le proche-oriet ancien. Actes de la XXXVIIIe Recontre Assyriologique Internationale. Paris, 8-10 juillet. (Paper is in English)

Salomon, Richard.

• 1990. New evidence for a Gāndhārī origin of the arapacana syllabary. Journal of the American Oriental Society. Apr-Jun, Vol.110 (2), p.255-273.
• 1993. An additoinal note on arapacana. Journal of the American Oriental Society. Vol.113 (2), p.275-6.
• 2006. Kharoṣṭhī syllables used as location markers in Gāndhāran stūpa architecture. Pierfrancesco Callieri, ed., Architetti, Capomastri, Artigiani: L’organizzazione dei cantieri e della produzione artistica nell’asia ellenistica. Studi offerti a Domenico Faccenna nel suo ottantesimo compleanno. (Serie Orientale Rome 100; Rome: Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente, 2006), pp. 181-224. [many thanks to Dr Salomon for sending me a copy of this paper]

19.10.2012 Eisel Mazard recently wrote a blog post about a story that occurs in both the Jātakas and Herodotus. The latter attributes the story to the Persian king Darius, which may indicate that it is originally a Persian story. The link is a bit tenuous, but if a Persian story also ends up in a Jātaka then it is another thread connecting Persia and Buddhist India.

It's up to us!

Christ has no body now but yours
No hands, no feet on earth but yours
Yours are the eyes through which He looks
compassion on this world
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

attributed to Saint Teresa of Avila (1515-1582)
(unsourced and possibly apocryphal)

I recently accompanied my mother to a church service at King's College. Durelle is a Christian and wanted to go to church on Sunday anyway. I am interested in the King's College Chapel as a beautiful sacred space, and in the wonderful choral music that accompanies services there. It happened to be Whit-Sunday (or Pentecost) , an important Christian festival, and as such a guest speaker gave the lesson. Professor John Harper focused on creativity as a manifestation of the descent of the Holy Spirit. I did not find this particularly convincing, but I was quite taken by the quote that he gave from St. Teresa. I immediately saw that replacing "Christ" with "the Tathāgata" would make for an interesting exercise:

The Tathāgata has no body now but yours
No hands, no feet on earth but yours
Yours are the eyes through which He looks
compassion on this world
The Tathāgata has no body now on earth but yours.

This resonates for me. Although the Buddha's have vowed to save us (from ourselves) it seems to me that we cannot afford to be complacent. In order to keep the Dharma alive we must be the hands and feet of the Buddha. Some time ago I wrote a post on the idea of Grace in Buddhism - based on a translation of the Japanese kaji (Sanskrit: adhiṣṭhāna) as "grace". This rather beautiful teaching says that spiritual practice is a two way process: the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas do what they can for us, and our part is to be receptive to what they are offering.

Sangharakshita has said that an image for the spiritual community is the 1000 armed Avalokiteśvara - each of us being a hand of the Bodhisattva of Compassion, reaching out to help, provided with an eye in order to see where help is most needed. Avalokiteśvara's 1000 arms reach out to embrace all beings.

The call to action can be quite daunting. After all how can we mere mortals take up the burden of a Buddha? My approach to is to try to make a clear distinction between the ideal and what I'm capable of in practice. The ideal is universal loving kindness. The practice may be not acting out an angry impulse, or conversely doing something gratuitously generous. Such things may not "save" anyone, but they contribute to a better world. If everyone was making this kind effort then it really would be a better world. And in the long run generosity, kindness, selflessness etc are liberating.

In terms of our local Buddhist community I think this means helping others as best we can. Not everyone is skilled enough, or temperamentally suited to teaching, but those who are need to be supported. Reaching out to people who want the Dharma is demanding, and doing it without a supportive Sangha behind you is much more so - as those pioneers taking the Dharma to new towns or countries will know. Often just an enthusiastic presence at a centre can make a difference. It did for me when I first went looking for meditation instruction. Members of our community will need assistance from time to time, in all sorts of ways, and it is up to us to help them.

Compassion also means forgiving people. Forgiving them for letting us down, or even for harming us. And justice which involves harming or humiliating the other is no justice at all - the Karaṇiya Mettā Sutta makes this clear. We need to be rational about this also. If someone has harmed us, then it may not be sensible to be around them unless they have undergone a big change and sincerely renounced harm. It may be best to avoid someone who is violent. However it is important to try to see the suffering that the violent person is creating, and reflect on the consequences for them. If we wish harm or suffering on them then we too will reap the same fruit.

The quote above may be apocryphal, but this does not reduce it's applicability. As Buddhists we aim to follow the Buddha; we aim to be like him; to emulate his fine qualities and graceful bearing; we aim to in the long run become a Buddha ourselves.

image: St Teresa of Avila

Mettā Sutta translation

This is a new translation, not simply a paraphrase of an earlier translation. I have attempted to use contemporary idiom and reasonably sensible English syntax. The original is in verse, but I haven't tried to reproduce the meter. The Karaṇīya Mettā Sutta occurs in the Sutta Nipāta (Sn 1.8 = PTS: Sn 143-152).

I've speculated, in another post, that the sutta might once have stopped at verse nine, but an extra verse was added as a result of a lost metaphor.







The Karaṇīya Mettā Sutta.

If you know what is good for you, and what to do about it,
Having understood what true happiness is,
Then this is what you would do:

Be practical, straight forward, direct and honest
Be polite and accept advice graciously
Be tender hearted and not arrogant
Be contented, with moderate appetite, and needs easily met
Be easy going
And do not take on many responsibilities
Be grounded and in control of yourself
Be prudent and not reckless or impulsive
And don’t go chasing after status
Never do even the slightest thing that would result in a bad conscience,
Or give the Wise cause to reprove you.

May they have happiness and peace
May all beings be happy in themselves
Whatever living beings there are,
Those suffering and those released from suffering, leaving none out
All beings of whatever size or shape
Fine or coarse, refined or rustic
Seen or unseen
Beings in remote places, and those around you
Those already born, and those about to be born
May all beings be happy in themselves

Not humiliating, or despising, anyone anywhere
And never, though angry, or experiencing anger,
Never wish suffering for another
Just as a mother would give her life to protect her only child
Likewise include all beings everywhere in your heart and mind
With loving kindness for all the world
In all directions of space, unobstructed, peaceable and without enmity
The heart embraces all.

Whatever you are doing, in every activity
As far as is humanly possible sustain these reflections
To do so, it is said, is to dwell with god right here and now!

Hold your opinions lightly, and be virtuous and good
See things as they really are
And having given up addiction to sensuous pleasures
You will surely not have to suffer rebirth again.

Mañjuśrī's Sword

Mañjuśrī is an archetypal Bodhisattva associated with Prajñāpāramitā or the Perfection of Wisdom. Recently I became interested in his sword because it doesn't quite seem right for a Mahāyāna figure, nor for a peaceful deity, to be holding an implement that is more typical of wrathful figures.

Bodhisattvas as objects of separate cults emerge relatively late in comparison to their appearances in texts. So for instance Mañjuśrī appears in early texts like the Viṃalakirtinirdeśa Sūtra (1st or 2nd century CE) but there are no representations of Mañjuśrī in Indian Buddhist art until the 6th century. Although I can't confirm this, it seems to me that the appearance of (large scale) iconographic representations of Bodhisattvas other than Maitreya appear to coincide with the early period of Tantric Buddhism. It also seems likely to me that individual Bodhisattvas were not worshipped widely in India until that time. In China a cult of Mañjuśrī appears a century or two earlier, but it takes a different form to that in India and is centred around Mount Wu Tai.

The earliest representations of Mañjuśrī, whether Indian or Chinese, do not show him with a sword. The earliest Indian iconography shows him with right hand in the varada mūdra, left hand holding an utpala lotus; his hair is braided, and he wears a tiger's class necklace. (see image left) The last item is a protective amulet worn by children. In early Chinese images however he is shown teaching and holding an iron staff. This staff, which broadens at the top, is a Confucian implement symbolising religious discourse. The Viṃalakirtinirdeśa, which features Mañjuśrī in a discussion with Vimalakirti, was a key influence on Chinese iconography.

Rob Linrothe's study of wrathful images, Ruthless Compassion, provides a clue to what might have happened. Although Mañjuśrī himself is not shown with a sword, he and other Bodhisattvas such as Vajrapaṇi are frequently accompanied a smaller companion figure who does. The dwarf-like figures seem to derive from Śaiva images of the dwarf Vamana. In particular Mañjuśrī is accompanied by a figure called Yamāntaka. Yamāntaka, of course, goes on to become a distinct figure and plays a very important role in Tibetan Buddhism. However at first he is very much linked to the peaceful form of the Bodhisattva and seems to represent the "power" of the Bodhisattva. Importantly Yamāntaka is depicted as wielding a sword in these images.

In Linrothe's account of the development of Tantric iconography, this kind of Bodhisattva plus attendant image persisted even when new developments occurred, so that the various layers all co-existed. This mirrors the situation for the development of texts which Buddhists were loath to repudiate completely even when a new text proclaimed, as they inevitably do, that what has come before was merely provisional or meant for people of lesser ability. The next phase after the Bodhisattva/Dwarf companions is that the wrathful figures become independent. So for instance in the Mahāvairocana Abhisaṃbodhi Tantra (ca mid 7th century) Trailokyavijaya, Acala, and Hayagrīva are independent wrathful figures whose function is the protection of sacred spaces (i.e. mandalas) and the destruction of obstacles. Images of Yamāntaka

In the case of Mañjuśrī I suggest that he got his sword from Yamāntaka, but only after they had gone their separate ways which was evident by about the 10th century. But why would a peaceful Bodhisattva take up a sword, even a so-called sword of wisdom? The sword culturally speaking represents the polar opposite of Buddhist values - it is an implement of killing, designed in fact for the single purpose of killing humans.

A possible answer is provided by Adalbert Gail in his paper "Mañjuśrī and his sword" (see below). He suggests that the cult of Mañjuśrī began in China, which explains why images of Mañjuśrī appeared there centuries before they did in India. We know that in some cases, the Heart Sūtra being a classic example, that Chinese Buddhism had an influence on Indian Buddhism. In ths case Gail surmises that the iron discussion staff was an implement unfamiliar to Indian Buddhists, and so when they met it, probably via Chinese pilgrims in India, they may have assumed that it was a sword. By this time wrathful images, such as Yamāntaka had already appeared so a Buddhist figure holding a sword may not have seemed so unusual. Later images of Mañjuśrī holding a sword were taken to China where they became popular.

Much of this argument is speculative and will likely remain so, but it seems a plausible account given what we do know. The story of Mañjuśrī's sword is a good example of how iconographic, non-textual information, all too often overlooked by Buddhists and Buddhologists, contributes to our understanding of Buddhist history.


Bibliography

• Gail, Adalbert. "Mañjuśrī and his sword," in Kooij, K.R. Van and Veere, H. van der (eds.) Function and meaning in Buddhist art : proceedings of a seminar held at Leiden University 21-24 October 1991. Groningen: Egbert Forstan, 1995
• Linrothe, Rob. Ruthless compassion : wrathful deities in early Indo-Tibetan Esoteric Buddhist art. London : Serindia Publications, 1996.

image: Mañjuśrī accompanied by Yamāntaka (with sword), ca 8th century, Nalanda in Linrothe, p.68.


16 June 2008
NOTE: In writing this essay I missed an obvious reference to Mañjuśrī's sword in a Mahāratnakūṭa Sūtra called the Suṣṭhitamati-paripṛcchā. A little more research would be required to see if the date of the text has been established - the Ratnakūṭa (or Jewel Heap) texts are a collection which span a period time but begin to be translated into Chinese about the 2nd century. In this text Mañjuśrī moves as if to kill the Buddha with his sword! He is stopped by a discourse on the emptiness of beings.

If I were to rewrite this essay in light of that passage it would probably look entirely different. I wonder why neither Linrothe nor Gail mention it as it has direct bearing on what they write about, perhaps like me they simply over looked it?

A translation of the passage can be found in Chang, G. C. C. 1983. A treasury of Mahāyāna Sūtras : selections from the Mahāratnakūṭa Sūtras. Pennsylvania : Buddhist Association of the US, p.68. See Also Sangharakshita. 1985. The Eternal Legacy : an introduction to the Canonical Literature of Buddhism. London : Tharpa. p.186.

The Mad Monk and the Process of Making the Vinaya

Rasputin, the "mad monk".

About 10 years ago I read Peter Harvey's article on Culpability in the Vinaya, and was taken by the story of the Mad Monk. His name is.... wait for it.... Gagga. I immediately went looking for some etymological link between the name and our English word for someone who is mad, and found that the two are, sadly, totally unrelated. The English "gaga" - meaning mad - comes from French and is thought to be imitative; while the name from the Pāli means "swift flowing" and probably relates to the name of a river.

The case of Gagga provides a very interesting window into the process of making Vinaya rules. Gagga is intermittently mad and unreliable. We know little more than this about him. Due to his bouts of madness he frequently did not answer the summons to the convocation of bhikkhus. Also Gagga was prone to breaking the vinaya rules and not remembering what he did. This lead to the development of two rules.

I should point out that the understanding of madness at this point is relatively sophisticated, and is clearly distinguished from possession by an evil spirit for instance. Madness is characterised in much the same way that we would now - a mad person comes to the wrong conclusions about their experience - confusing the subjective and objective. I'm not going to say any more about definitions of madness because they are so contested and conflicting that no precise definition is satisfactory. There is a tendency in the West to both romanticise madness on the one hand, and to demonize it on the other. We may associate madness with spiritual visions (I'm thinking for instance of William Blake), or with high spirits. Those who have recovered from Madness and written about it, however, talk about it as nightmarish. On the other hand we may think of all mad people as homicidal psychopaths, whereas in fact most mad people are a danger only to themselves.

Also note that the figure of Gagga may not have existed, but may be a cipher for any bhikkhu with madness - he may simply be a story telling device. I discuss him as a person, but keep in mind that there is no other evidence that he lived.

Gaga, then, does not show up for meetings. [Vin. i.123] All fully ordained bhikkhus were (and still are) required to come together regularly to recite the patimokkha and to formally discipline any bhikkhu has broken any of the Vinaya rules. By not turning up when called Gagga was disrupting the life of the Sangha. In this case the Buddha allows the bhikkhus to decide that someone is mad, and to carry on without him.

Gagga also breaks the rules. [Vin II.82] Peter Harvey discusses this aspect in his article. In the first place Gagga is accused of an offence but denies it. The bhikkhus do not accept his denial and go to the Buddha, but the Buddha says they must accept that if he says he cannot remember, that he is telling the truth. This ad-hoc decision is also later codified so that in many places madness is cited as a reason that a bhikkhu is not culpable for his actions. Here we see the movement from ad-hoc to general rule.

I have not followed this up, but the two examples of rule making which centre around Gagga make me think that this process must have been influential in the development of the vinaya. It was not the only process though, for example rules are often made because laypeople complain directly to the Buddha about the behaviour of the bhikkhus.

Apart from the insight that this gives us into how the vinaya developed, I want to note one very interesting point about Gagga. Despite being rather troublesome, as mad people can be, the response in the vinaya is not to expel him. There is no suggestion that Gagga's affliction put him outside the Sangha, even when he has consistently broken the rules. Madness is deemed to be an affliction rather than a moral failing. Someone who is mad, according to the vinaya, cannot be held responsible for their actions while mad. 

At some point I'd like to do a comparison of this attitude to the changing Western attitudes to madness collated by Michel Foucault in his book Madness and Civilisation. I can briefly say that the attitude in the vinaya appears to be different from Western attitudes at any point in our history. In Europe mad people were initially tolerated unless they became disruptive when they might be driven out of town. With the valorisation of reason in the Renaissance, madness was seen as moral failure. Lazar houses standing empty with the drastic reduction in leprosy began to be filled with the mad. Freud led a change in attitude to madness - from a moral failure to medical condition. These days the "chemical imbalance" theory is beginning to give way to a genetic paradigm. In other words, and this is what seemed to attract Foucault to the subject, the way we understand madness and treat the mad reflects the currents in wider society. The attitude to madness in the Pāli canon may well afford us insights into early Buddhist society - at least the idealised form of it that is represented in canonical texts.

~~oOo~~

Playing with Fire

I've made several references over the last year and a half to the Numata lectures by Professor Richard Gombrich in 2006. These are in the process of being published as a book. I have been re-reading the notes from those lectures and wanted to highlight lecture seven which discussed the use of fire as a metaphor by the Buddha.

Anyone familiar with the discourses of the Buddha will most likely have clocked that the Buddha uses fire as a metaphor in several different ways. Most notably there is the fire sermon (Āditta-pariyāya, Vin i.34-5) in which the Buddha tells the monks that "everything is on fire". What the Buddha means by "everything" is the five sense faculties and the mind, the objects of our senses, and the whole psychological process of experience. What he means by "on fire" is that we our experience is burning with desire, with hatred, and with spiritual ignorance. The goal of the Buddhist path is nibbāna (Sanskrit nirvāṇa) which means quite literally the blowing out of a flame, or ceasing to burn.

This much is consonant with the received tradition. However Prof. Gombrich has investigated other aspects of this fire metaphor. One of the most interesting related to the nidāna chain - the 12 membered list of factors which condition each other and are said to describe the process of repeated becoming in saṃsara. As part of this list we find that desire (taṇhā) gives rise to "clinging" (upādāna), which in turn is what gives rise to becoming (bhavanā). Gombrich suggests that the word upādāna might well have originally been used in it's more concrete sense of "fuel". In this view clinging would be fuel for becoming, and in my opinion this works much better as an explanation of process. Thus the nidāna chain is a continuation of the fire metaphor into the process of dependent arising.

Upādāna is also used in describing the whole of our psycho-physical experience. The khandhas (Sanskrit skandha) are referred to at times as the five aggregates of clinging (pañca-upādāna-kkhandhā). This is an awkward phrase. It makes no more sense, apparently, in Pāli than the translation does in English. Gombrich notes that there is a common Pāli expression for a blazing fire: aggi-khandha. He suggests that upādāna-kkhandha should be read as a contraction of upādāna-aggi-kkhandha and be translated as blazing masses of fuel. The khandas in other words are an extension of the Buddha's use of the fire metaphor. They are the fuel for the burning desire that prolongs our existence.

The Vedic religion was one in which fire played a central role. There is evidence that fire worship goes back well beyond the entry of the Vedic speaking peoples into India. Fire was very much part of the religious imagination of India by the time of the Buddha, and Gombrich argues that it is from this source that the Buddha draws for his fire metaphor. The key evidence here is a difficult paper by Polish academic Joanna Jurewicz which draws parallels between the terms used in the nidāna chain and certain concepts central to the Vedic religion. Professor Jurewicz argues that the Pāli nidāna model can be seen as a polemic against the Vedic cosmogony. The paper is a not easy to follow: ideally one would be well versed in Vedic language and religion as well as Pāli, but it is very interesting, and Professor Gombrich considers the case to have been demonstrated for some kind of influence.

The primary metaphor for consciousness in the Vedic tradition is fire, hence the Buddha framed his understanding of consciousness in similar terms. But whereas the late Vedic tradition contained a notion of absolute consciousness, the Buddha claimed that there is only consciousness of something: like fire consciousness requires fuel to continue, but also crucially despite being a non-random process (i.e. without fuel there can be no fire) fire operates with no guiding "person" behind it.

This is a brief overview of a more technical and thorough discussion by Professor Gombrich. It continues the theme of looking at the way the Buddha drew on the traditions surrounding him, especially the Vedic tradition, of images and concepts with which to communicate his Insight. It also reassesses the way the received tradition explains some technical terms. What Professor Gombrich has shown on more than one occasion is that the received tradition is confused on some points of doctrine or linguistics. This is important for contemporary Buddhists. It emphasises that the Buddhist texts are not divine revelation, they are no infallible and we must be wary of an over literal interpretation of them. In particular where the Buddha used metaphors drawn from the Vedic traditions, there have often be misunderstood by later Buddhists, even in some cases before the canon was written down. Doctrines must be tested against experience.

~~oOo~~