Keeping up Appearances

One time the Buddha was staying near the town of Āpaṇa in the country of the Angas. Anga was to the west of Magadha in what we would now most likely call Western Bengal. After taking alms in Āpaṇa, the Buddha retired to a forest grove for the day where he met an interesting character named Potaliya after whom the sutta is named* The text says that he was sampanna-nivāsana-pāvuraṇo chatta-upāhanāhi - possessed of clothing and cloak, a parasol** and sandals. That is to say he was well dressed by the standards of the day, and massively over dressed by the standards of the samaṇas. Despite his appearance Potaliya considered himself to have gone forth from the home life, and so he was miffed when the Buddha addressed him as "gahapati". This word is usually translated as 'householder' - we'll come back to this. After Potaliya complains about being called gahapati, he and the Buddha have a discussion about what going forth is really like, and the Buddha offers an intriguing definition of it. Potaliya says that he has sabbe kammantā paṭikkhittā sabbe vohārā samucchinna - stopped all work and given up all of his business interests.

So let us begin by looking more closely at this word gahapati (Sanskrit gṛhapati). I have mentioned it before in my collection of philological odds and ends. There I noted that Jan Nattier says that the term seems to have meant something rather more than householder. Gaha does mean house, but pati means "lord, master" - so it is more literally house-master. The thing is that, as in much of Western history, very few people in the Buddha's day would have owned property. Witness the fact that the word for house in Latin, domus, also gives us the words domain, dominion, and dominant. The owner of a house (dominus) was someone of considerable means, not to say power. Similarly the word pati (lord) has a Latin cognate potis meaning 'powerful, able, capable' from which we get our English word potent. So a gahapati (Latin domus-potens?) is more literally someone who has the power of, or over, a dominion. In terms of social standing the gahapati is often mentioned alongside brahmins and kṣatriyas - ie alongside, but not included in the two higher varṇas or classes. It seems as though gahapati was a kind of title for someone not from the higher varṇas, but who was none-the-less a significant person in terms of wealth and influence, most likely a successful merchant. We can note here that the Buddha thought of Potaliya as a gahapati because of his clothing and appearance - he dressed like a rich man. In these days where home ownership is the norm in the West it is a bit hard to grasp the meaning of gahapati when translated as householder. I was thinking that 'squire' (a non-aristocratic landowner) would have done nicely in T.W. Rhys Davids' day, but is a bit archaic now - I quite like the idea of the Buddha greeting Potaliya as squire. I suggest that 'landlord' might come closer than householder to capturing the meaning.

So this is the first point of the sutta - you can't walk around dressed like a rich person and claim to have gone forth (take note monks in silk robes!). Potaliya says that he's given up his work and left his money to his children. He takes a back seat in business affairs and relies on his children for food and clothing. We might say 'early retirement on a fat pension'. In contemporary times we find many of our Buddhist brethren concerned with fashion and appearance (especially the craze for having tattoos!). Many of us own property, have careers and families. The point is not so much that the lifestyle is wrong, but that we should not kid ourselves about having gone forth when we have not! If we still have a cell-phone and a computer, and CDs and DVDs; if we own a house or any other substantial property, then we are quite simply householders - we are not monks. In the FWBO we used to talk about semi-monastic lifestyles - somewhere in between. My observation is that most people are more semi than monastic - we like our little luxuries.

That said the teaching which comes next is not concerned with appearances at all. The Buddha does not ask Potaliya to give up his clothes and parasol, doesn't even talk in material terms and he latches onto this phrase "vohārā samucchinna" - giving up business. Note here that Potaliya was using vohāra in the sense of his work, but the Buddha has retained the word but is using it in a more general sense - a rhetorical technique he uses quite often. Potaliya's phrase vohārā smucchinna, then, is used as a synonym of the more familiar word pabbajana - going forth.

The Buddha begins by outlining a system of ethics, and then says that the culmination of his path is, in effect, the going forth from addiction to sensual pleasure. His disciples undertake eight practises in order to give "give up business". These are abandoning killing living beings (pāṇātipāto), taking the not given (adinnādāna), false speech (musāvāda), slander (pisuṇā vācā), greedy desires (giddhilobha), angry blame (nindārosa), consuming-rage (kodhūpāyāso), arrogance (atimāna). The noble disciple goes forth by abandoning the negative quality, and by developing the positive opposite. This set of eight precepts is similar in content and spirit to the ten kusala-kammā, the ten skilful actions which members of the Western Buddhist Order (and incidentally Shingon followers) undertake. There is nothing here about haircuts, or clothing, or meal times and the suggestion is that going forth is synonymous with practising ethics - that is going forth from unwholesome behaviour, speech and mental states.

Why begin with ethics? The text answers this on several levels. Firstly someone killing living beings etc, would blame themselves - ie experience guilt; they would be censured by the wise; and they would be destined for an unhappy rebirth after death. Furthermore killing a living being etc is itself a fetter (saṃyojana) and a hindrance (nīvaraṇa). Lastly killing living beings etc creates taints (āsāva) trouble (vighāta) and distress (pariḷāha), while abstaining does not create them. I see this list as appealing to the reader in different ways. We may not, for instance, be so motivated by rebirth, but we might care about the opinions of our kalyana mitras. Or we might be thinking in terms of trying to not create extra hurdles for ourself in life. However we relate to ethics we need to reflect on how our behaviour impacts on other beings, and how that affects us in return. This is conditionality in the gross sense.

But the Buddha cautions Potaliya by saying that going forth is not complete with ethics. Cutting off of all business affairs - really retiring from the world - is not simply a matter of ethics. Now the discussion becomes more reflective, the Buddha invites Potaliya to consider a number of metaphors for his relationship to pleasurable sensation (kāmā).

I have been making this point over and over for some time now. In order to really be free we must begin to understand the effect of sensations on our minds - especially pleasant sensations. The Buddha, for instance, compares sensual pleasure to a bone cleaned of all meat, but smeared in blood and thrown to a dog. Clearly the bone would be very attractive - would smell and taste nice, but it would not provide any sustenance. A number of similar metaphors follow reflecting the unsatisfactory nature of experiences. They are intended as subjects for reflection, intended as meditation subjects in other words. First ethics to prepare the way, and then meditation from which wisdom can arise. Wisdom is seeing that the conditioned nature of experience (yathābhūta) and results in the cutting off from 'business' entirely and in all ways (sabbena sabbaṃ sabbathā sabbaṃ vohārasamuchhedo).

Potaliya understands the Buddha's message, he sees that although he has retired from his worldly affairs, he has not renounced his addiction to sensual pleasures. Up to this point he has been quite confused in fact. He is now inspired by the example of the samaṇas and respects them, and he becomes a Buddhist by stating that he goes for refuge to the three jewels.

So the emphasis here is not on a monastic lifestyle even though the starting point is the incongruency of a wealthy man believing he has retired from the world when he still has fine clothes. The Buddha never criticises Potaliya directly about what he is wearing. He just offers him a more complete vision of vohārasamuchhedo or giving up business. It's not that Potaliya or other rich merchants like Anāthapiṇḍika could not practise the Dharma. They could, and Anāthapiṇḍika for one attains stream entry. The problem is fooling ourselves about what constitutes the path and where we are on it.

I think this is a sutta which speaks to the contemporary Western Buddhist - we are often very well off materially compared to, for example, our Indian Buddhist brethren. An amusing manifestation of this is when people justify little luxuries by invoking the middle way - meaning that though it is in fact an indulgent luxury, that in view of the massive luxury we live surrounded by it is not so much. This is not the middle way as I understand it, this is the kind of rationalisation that Potaliya was involved in. Be that as it may our first task as Buddhists is not to become homeless and give away our possessions - the real meaning of going forth is a rigorous engagement with ethics, going forth from unwholesome acts of body, speech and mind; followed by serious, prolonged and determined reflection on the nature of experience and our responses to experience. If we are honestly doing this, then we will naturally be more inclined to renunciation, and not concerned with appearances.


Notes

* Potaliya Sutta MN 54, PTS M i.359. My own translations. Translated by Ñāṇamoli and Bodhi in the Middle Length Discources p.466f, and in part by Thanissaro on Access to Insight. Pāli text from www.tipitaka.org.
** PED suggests that parasol for chatta would be misleading since the pole of a chatta was fixed to the circumphrance rather than centre of the circle. However the two have the same purpose.

My thanks to Joe Shier for drawing my attention to the Potaliya Sutta.

Indo-European Languages

It occurs to me that I often go on about etymology and the links between Sanskrit and English words and yet I've never said much about that link. How can a Sanskrit and an English word possibly be linked, or even cognate? It's because Sanskrit and English are both members of a large family of languages known as Indo-European (IE). This includes most of the languages of Europe (the major exceptions are Basque, Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian), and the languages of North India. These share many grammatical and morphological features.

We have to begin this story in the middle. During the period when Britain ruled over most of India many men were sent out to India as administrators. These men often had a classical education - that is they read Latin and Greek, and were familiar with the works of the classical authors. Sir William Jones (1746-1794) had gone much further and was a gifted linguist, having published translations from Persian and Arabic, and learned a number of other languages besides. However his livelihood was in law and he was appointed to be a Judge in Calcutta in 1783. Here he came into contact with Sanskrit and within a few years was publishing translations from Sanskrit. Jones reported to the Asiatic Society of Calcutta, which he had founded, in February 1786 that there was an apparent relationship between Latin, Greek and Sanskrit: "... no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists."

Subsequently much work has been done in comparative linguistics to demonstrate that the same kind of links exist between very many other languages. The 'Euro' of Indo-European includes the groups: Celtic languages, Germanic (including English), Italic (aka Romantic), Slavic, Greek, Albanian; Armenian. The 'Indo' stands in fact for Indo-Iranian - this branch includes Persian/Iranian, Panjabi, Hindi, Gujurati, Marathi, Bihari, Bengali. Of the European exceptions Basque may well be a remnant of the languages spoken in Europe before the Indo-European ancestors moved into that area. Finnish, Estonian, and Magyar (i.e. Hungarian) are members of the Finno-Ugric branch of the Uralic family which seems to have had an ancestral homeland in and around the Ural mountains. Basque is not related to any other known language - as such it is known as a language isolate.

One of areas where Indo-European languages show similarities is in kinship nouns. Consider for example the word for father.

Sanskrit	pitṛ (nominative pitā)
Greek	pater
Latin	pater
German	vater
Hindi	pitā

One can see that there are changes from /p/ to /v/; and from /t/ to /d/ and to /th/ in English. These changes are typical of the type of changes that happen from language to language. So the sounds used for the word father are either the same, or related to each other via a known process.

Another area where the links are clear is in numbers.

Sanskrit

Greek

Latin

German

English

Hindi

1

eka

eis

unus

eins

one

ek

2

dvi

duo

duo

zwei

two

do

3

tri

treis

tres

drei

three

tīn

4

catur

tettares

quattuor

vier

four

cār

5

pañca

pente

quinque

fünf

five

pañc

6

ṣaṣ

hex

sex

sechs

six

chah

7

sapta

hepta

septem

sieben

seven

sāt

8

aṣṭa

octo

octo

acht

eight

āṭh

9

nava

ennea

novem

neun

nine

no

10

daśa

deca

decem

zehn

ten

das

Again the similarity in some cases is striking (two, eight) and in some cases less obvious but subject to understandable variation (four, five). Of course linguists have marshalled a lot more evidence over the two centuries since "India" Jones wrote his paper. So much so that it has been possible to tentatively reconstruct what the precursor language might have sounded like and worked. This language is called Proto-Indo-European. PIE is a best guest as nothing in fact survives from that time which might indicate what language was spoken or how it was spoken. It seems likely that there were a range of related dialects some of which had more input than others - which is what we see in later India and Europe. For instance some linguists think that Pāli is not a direct descendent of the Vedic language of the Ṛgveda, but of a closely related dialect.

The word āryan is often used in this context though Indo-Aryan is being replaced by Indo-Iranian in linguistic circles. There are two reasons for this. Firstly there are the unfortunate associations with the Nazi racial purity ideas. These are alive and well if the internet is anything to go by. Racist Europeans still try to show that they are a pure race descended from the āryans. They don't seem to realise that almost every one else in Europe is as well, including that often hated group the Gypsies whose Roma language is included amongst the IE family and whose origins are likely to have been in North West Rajasthan.

The second reason is more important for linguists. If anything āryan describes a linguistic group, not a racial group. This is very important. Sometimes the IE family has nothing to do with race. When peoples migrate they often end up speaking the tongue of their neighbours. In any case race is a rather vaguely defined concept these days. Genetics are showing that where we perceive racial difference there is often little evidence of this in DNA. In fact, for instance, for some genes all people in India are similar - including speakers of IE, Dravidian, and Munda languages. Race is not a natural category, it is one we impose on people.

Using the phrase Indo-Iranian refers to a geographic area. And what we see is that languages in proximity may share features that distant, but related, languages do not. A very important case is the use of retroflex consonants. These are pronounced with the tip of the tongue curled back to touch the top of the palette, and are Romanised as ṭ ṭh ḍ ḍh ṇ and ṣ. Of the IE languages only the languages of India use them. This is well established by the time of the Ṛgveda (ca. 1500 BCE). The Dravidian languages, centred by not entirely confined to South India, also use retroflex consonants. It is a feature of Indian languages that transcends race or language family. Mind you, our English dentals (t th d dh n) sound retroflex to Indian speakers because we typically don't have our tongue on the teeth, but immediately behind them on the gum - the sound is less crisp than a true dental and so words like doctor, for instance, are transliterated with retroflexes: e.g. ḍaokṭor (ढॉक्टर्) in Hindi.

The earlier IE languages are heavily inflected. This means that endings are added to a word to tell us what its function in the sentence is (grammar). So in a simple sentence in Sanskrit like:

rāmo bhaginyā saha tāṃ nagarīmagacchat
Rāma went to town with his sister.

There would be no ambiguity if we change the words around (although the euphonic sandhi changes are slightly different - they don't affect the meaning)

aggacchat tāṃ nagarīṃ bhaginyā saha rāmaḥ

We always know that it is Rāma who is the agent, that his sister is with him, and that they went to town no matter the order. The trend in IE languages is away from use of inflections towards prepositions such as: to, with, his. If we mix up the word order in English then we confuse the meaning of the sentence. This trend is not inevitable, but is a characteristic of IE languages. Tamil went the other way for instance, becoming more inflected.

One thing which seems clear, although the scholarly debate rumbles on, is that the homeland of IE, or PIE, is not in India. The debate is largely kept up by Indian scholars who are keen to prove that Sanskrit was the indigenous language of North India. As sometimes happens where there are vested interests, the scholarly debate can be quite emotional with India scholars accused of Hindu Nationalism, while at the same time using terms like 'Orientalist' and 'Cultural Imperialist' for their European detractors. However one must look to the evidence which supports the view that the Indo-European languages originated from the Caspian Sea area in what is now Turkmenistan.

Another area of dispute is the Indus Valley civilisation. This is a rather large topic, so I'm only going to skim it. Basically from possibly as early as 7000 BCE up to about 1700 BCE there was a civilisation along the Indus River, and the now dried up Saraswati River. Their material remains were only discovered in the 20th century, but it seems clear that they were for a long time a successful culture - with possible trading links to the Middle East. The cities were abandoned gradually, rather than being over-run by invaders (scotching the Āryan invasion theory) probably due to a major shift in the patterns of the monsoons which caused the Saraswati to dry up. They left behind hundreds of little clay tablets with symbols on them. Too few to be a ideographic writing like Chinese, and too many to be an alphabet. They most likely do represent some form of written language - similar to Egyptian hieroglyphs which mixed words, ideas, and sounds to create about 400 symbols in all. But what that language is remains a mystery - despite many attempts to decipher it. None of the many claims to have deciphered it stand up to scrutiny, and most exploit the ambiguity of having not texts but only very short sequences of characters to work with - a maximum of 20, but an average of about 8. It would have been nice if the Indus language turned out to be Sanskrit, but this seems not to be the case. Neither is it Dravidian - there is little evidence for Dravidian people having been driven out of the North by Āryan invaders either. One possibility is that it is related to Munda - the family of languages spoken by remnant tribal populations in part of India and related to Malay.

So some mysteries remain. The exact relationship of the speakers of Indo-European languages is still not entirely clear, though the answer most likely lies in the areas of geography and sociology rather than race. But the relationships between IE languages themselves is clear, and the evidence very strong. They are all related, and probably all grew out of one language, or a very small number of closely related dialects. Some languages seem to be less changed than others. Slavic languages for instance are closer to PIE than the Germanic languages. Romantic languages, whose roots in Latin are still obvious, often show considerable similarity. But even in English one can see the relationship if one is observant.

In the seen...

There is a very famous story regarding the ascetic Bāhiya Dārucīriya (Bāhiya of the bark garment) who travels far to find the Buddha. He repeatedly asks the Buddha for a teaching and eventually the Buddha turns and utters the now famous words: "in the seen, only the seen; in the heard only the heard" - etc for all the senses. However it is quite difficult to know exactly what the Buddha meant, and although we get a general picture the details are sometimes left obscure. Indeed scholars allow that the passages which follow are not really understood any more.

I recently stumbled upon precisely the same teaching being given to another person in the Saṃyutta Nikāya. Māluṅkyaputta is an elderly bhikkhu and asks the Buddha for a nice brief teaching that he can reflect on. The Buddha repeats the same words as he says to Bāhiya. Fortunately for us Māluṅkyaputta is not sure he understands either, and he asks the Buddha for clarification. He does this by spelling out his understanding and asking if that is what the Buddha meant. And since it he gets it right we can learn from this sutta.

Here is an edited version of what he said:

Rūpaṃ disvā sati muṭṭhā, piyaṃ nimittaṃ manasi karoto;
Sārattacitto vedeti, tañca ajjhosa tiṭṭhati.

Tassa vaḍḍhanti vedanā, anekā rūpasambhavā;
Abhijjhā ca vihesā ca cittamassūpahaññati;
Evaṃ ācinato dukkhaṃ, ārā nibbānamuccati.

..sutvā ... ghatvā... bhotvā... phussa... dhammaṃ ñatvā

Having seen a form with mindfulness forgotten,
attending to the delightful appearance
Experiencing an impassioned mind,
and remaining attached to that

In him numberless sensations multiply from that form.
Covetousness and worry impair thinking.
Thus suffering is heaped up and nibbāna is said to be remote.

Similarly for sounds, smells, tastes, contact, and the knowledge of mental objects.

So let's pause here to consider what's been said so far. This is our existential situation. We see forms, hear sounds, etc and we are entranced by them. Consider that we do not have one sensory experience at the time, but live in a flood of sense impressions all giving rise to sensations and thoughts. So the problem is multiplied many times. And, because we are caught up in the delightful sensations that our senses deliver up to us, we are covetous. As I say - we seek happiness by pursuing pleasure. We worry when we don't get pleasure - either new pleasures or the same old pleasures. We are appalled when we get unpleasant sensations because we think this means we are unhappy. And all this impairs our mental functioning. We get caught up in the pursuit of pleasure and defending ourselves from worry and vexation. We accumulate material goods, we indulge in hedonism, we fight and quarrel over things. And none of this actually makes us happy! In fact the more we go on like this the less happiness we are likely to have. The more we have the less content we will be. The more pleasure we find, the less we will enjoy it. Pleasant sensations are like addictive drugs - after a while we need more to get the same effect.

So in this state nibbāna - the blowing out of the fires that torment us - is remote. It is remote because our craving is fuel for the fire. We keep the fire burning by pursuing pleasure and reacting against pain.

The sutta continues:

Na so rajjati rūpesu, rūpaṃ disvā paṭissato;
Virattacitto vedeti, tañca nājjhosa tiṭṭhati.
Yathāssa passato rūpaṃ, sevato cāpi vedanaṃ;
Khīyati nopacīyati, evaṃ so caratī sato;
Evaṃ apacinato dukkhaṃ, santike nibbānamuccati.

Having mindfully seen a form, he does not delight in forms,
He experiences dispassion and remains unattached
He sees a form and has the associated sensation,
It falls away, does not accumulate - thus he exercises mindfulness.
Thus suffering is not heaped up, and nibbāna is said to be near.

So what is the alternative to heaping fuel on the fire? Should we just give up everything and join a monastery? Well it's not quite as simple as that. Renunciation in a worldly sense can sometimes be counter productive if we remain mentally attached to the thing. Renouncing pleasure qua pleasure is not really possible. Those who try to do so end up cultivating pain, and that is quite as unhealthy as pursuing pleasure. The problem is our relationship to sensations. The key is mindfulness - which enables one to stay calm in the face of pleasure or pain, and to just experience what is happening in each moment as it happens.

This requires training. At first we don't even see that we have this kind of relationship to sensations. We have to become aware of what we are aware of, and not trundle along letting our unconscious reactions to things dictate our behaviour. This is what it means to become truly human - to rise above instinctual or habitual reactions and be conscious. By cultivating mindfulness of things, and our body and other people we generally refine our awareness. And most people find that this makes them slow down and appreciate things a little more, and it allows a measure of contentment to develop. This is preliminary to the greater work which is to begin to see more clearly that pleasure is not equal to happiness, and vice versa, and equally that pain - as in the physical sensation of pain - doesn't necessarily equate to unhappiness.

We may also pay attention to the grosser forms of impermanence and cause and effect - this helps us to tune into the spirit of the teachings. At some point our focus needs to shift to the impermanence of experience itself: to the way that experiences occur when the conditions are there (that is to say sense organ, sense object and sense consciousness) and that nothing substantial is found in the experience itself. Pleasurable experiences in particular do not last, they create no lasting happiness, and if we are very subtly attuned we begin to sense that our addiction means that as soon as we feel pleasure we begin to fear it's end - we cling to it.

So in order to be closer to extinguishing the flames that torment us we need to stop feeding the fire. When we have a sense experience we try to stay aware of it's temporary and contingent nature - we have that experience, but do not try to hold onto it, and stay open to possibility. We become 'fed up' with chasing pleasure and we turn away from the chase. This detachment brings it's own rewards - we are calmer, we are content. Life becomes simpler. Equanimity means we have more energy since we no longer waste it, and it is smoother. We are no longer rocked by the winds of change and fortune - because we stop looking for happiness in pleasant experiences.

Notes

• The Māluṅkyaputta Sutta is in the Saṃyutta Nikāya (SN 35.95 PTS: S iv.72). Pāli text from tipitka.org. Translated by Bhikkhu Bodhi The Collected Discourses p. 1175-8. It is also translated by Bhikkhu Thanissaro on Access to Insight.
• On Nibbāna and the fire metaphor see also my essay: Everything is on fire!
• Another take on the Māluṅkyaputta Sutta can be found in this interesting essay: theravadin.wordpress.com.

image: eye by Guhyaraja.

The Simile of the Chariot

One time in Sāvatthi the bhikkhunī Vajirā went on her alms round, and then having eaten her meal she went to meditate in the Blind Man's Grove. Māra appeared to her and tried to frighten her and disrupt her meditation. He planted questions in her mind: who created this being? Where is the creator? Where does this being arise, where cease? Vajirā however knew these thoughts to be the product of Māra. She replied:

Kiṃ nu sattoti paccesi, māra diṭṭhigataṃ nu te;
Suddhasaṅkhārapuñjoyaṃ, nayidha sattupalabbhati.

Yathā hi aṅgasambhārā, hoti saddo ratho iti;
Evaṃ khandhesu santesu, hoti sattoti sammuti.

Dukkhameva hi sambhoti, dukkhaṃ tiṭṭhati veti ca;
Nāññatra dukkhā sambhoti, nāññaṃ dukkhā nirujjhatī’’ti

What makes you resort to belief in 'a being' Māra?
A heap of mere fabrication, a being is not found here.

Just as the combination of parts is called 'a chariot';
Thus while there are the apparatus of experience, conventionally there is 'a being'

For only suffering is produced; suffering persists, and ceases.
None other than suffering is produced, none other than suffering ceases.  

Māra was disappointed at not frightening Vajirā, and he disappeared. This is the famous simile of the chariot from the Vajirā Sutta, in the Saṃyutta Nikāya (5:10; PTS S i.136). It is used to illustrate the idea that we are only an assemblage of parts, that nothing really exists in the absolute sense - as the sutta says when the parts come together we conventionally say 'a being'. This collection of parts is also called a mere heap of fabrication (suddha-saṅkhāra-puñjoyaṃ). But what are these parts? They are the khandhas. Traditionally these are defined as that which conventionally makes up a being. The definition is circular: a being is made up of the things that make up a being. There's not much information in that interpretation. However Sue Hamilton has given us a better way of thinking about the khandhas: they are the apparatus of experience. That is, instead of thinking of the khandhas as what makes up a being, we can think of the khandhas as the minimal requirements for having an experience. Briefly we have the locus of experience (form/rūpa), then "having met with sensory data (vedanā) [via the physical sense organs] we process it: we become aware of and identify the sensation (saññā), we categorise it and name it (viññāṇā), and we respond affectively to it (saṅhkāra)." [The Apparatus of Experience]

To my mind the focus on experience explains why no being is found. What might be found is the experience of a being, but there is no being apart from experience. However note the third verse spoken by Vajirā. It says that it is only suffering that arises, persists and ceases. Only suffering. Without this part of the verse the received explanation works alright. But the third verse tells us something extra. Here is a confirmation that what arises in dependence on causes are experiences. In my essay on the first verse of the Dhammapada I said: "... if we fail to see and understand the nature of experience (yathābhūta-ñāṇadassana), then suffering follows, just as the wheel follows the ox which draws the cart". Dukkha in this view is all unenlightened experience. This sounds a bit miserable, but as I recently pointed out [proliferation] it's not that pleasure is bad, but that we mistake the pursuit of pleasant sensations as leading to happiness, which they do not.

This kind of sutta where Māra visits someone and tries to put doubts in their mind is quite common. Māra here seems to be a psychological metaphor, i.e. Māra represents our own doubts coming to the surface. The tactic of getting into dialogue with that doubting voice is something that is used by some psychologists. It also resembles the approach of Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy - identifying thoughts and deciding whether to take them seriously or ignore them.

So where the apparatus of experience come together we conventionally say there is a being. But this is to mistake the experience of being, for something more substantial. We need to focus on experience and on the processes by which we have experiences, because it is experience - especially suffering - that arises in dependence on conditions. It is our failure to recognise experiences in general and suffering in particular as dependent, that causes us to suffer.

While the idea of a 'being' as made up of parts and therefore insubstantial and impermanent is far from wrong, I think the use to which the verse is put shows the weakness of taking verses out of context. Because the real import, the central point of the simile, occurs in the third verse - only suffering arises - and this is routinely left out of presentations of the Dharma. Here the context reveals once again that whatever the truth of ontology and the reality of beings, the Buddha was focussed on the problem of suffering.


The chariot simile is from the Vajirā Sutta (S 5:10; S i.136) Pāli text from CSCD Pāli Tipiṭaka; pg 230 in Bhikkhu Bodhi's translation which is also available on Access to Insight; translated by Bikkhu Thanissaro on Access to Insight.

image: from Achaemenid Persia by Mark Drury. The picture is of a chariot from Afghanistan but would have been very similar to Indian war chariots.

We are all going to die.

Years ago I shared a room with a man who was concerned that he didn't take the subject of his own death seriously enough. As a reminder he painted, in large black letters above his bed:

I am going to die

That man is still alive but in the intervening years a number of friends and acquaintances have died. My mother is alive and well, but my father died 19 years ago, and all of my grandparents are dead. As I write I'm absorbing the news that a colleague has died. I didn't know him very well, but I did live in his community when I first arrived in the UK seven years ago. He died of a stroke and it seems he had no time to set his affairs in order or to compose himself.

Once my preceptor gave a talk in which he said: "death is absolutely inconvenient." This has echoed down the years for me as I grieved for loved ones and friends. Death just comes and we are never ready for it. When death comes we will have plans for the future, we will leave unfinished projects, unresolved conflicts, and unrequited loves. All of those things that we have been putting off will never be done. It is a harsh and stark fact of life.

I often walk through the Mill Rd cemetery. This is a large old burial ground in which the grounds' keepers are gradually losing the battle against nature. Many of the stones are unreadable and all but a very few of the graves are untended and rely on public employees and occasional volunteers to keep the brambles and other weeds from overwhelming them. I noticed that some of the graves are not that old. Some of the people buried there probably have living grand children. It struck me that within two or three generations most people are forgotten. Even well loved people who raised a family and worked hard are just a name engraved on a crumbling piece of stone in a cemetery somewhere. If that.

None of this can be news to anyone. We all know that we are going to die. And yet we continue to live our lives, to choose our values and priorities as though death is far off. I was struck that Jade Goody - a UK star of so-called reality TV - was only 27 when she died of cancer. And yet she had achieved notoriety and celebrity if not universal public acclaim. She leaves two kids and a husband, but in all likelihood all of this will be forgotten in a generation or two. Most of us won't rate an obituary in the media, and won't have gotten around to starting that memoir that we sometimes toyed with writing. It's not that we have uninteresting lives, simply that we fall under the radar. We are unexceptional.

Have your ever played that game where someone asks you what you would do if you had only 24 hours left to live? It can be revealing, but, even if we do get notice of immanent death, we are often too sick to do anything but lie in a hospital bed in those last 24 hours. The world keeps turning, the seasons wax and wane, days and nights alternate, the tides slosh in and out, and the wind blows the fallen blossoms in autumn. All that just goes on without you. Nature doesn't shed a tear when you die - you are compost at best.

We have limited time and energy and yet we spend so much of it on things that simply don't matter in the long run. Accumulating possessions that will end up in charity shops when we're gone. Working long hours making money for share holders who don't even know our names, and who are themselves are unexceptional on the whole and achieve nothing of significance with the money we make for them. So much of our economic activity we now know unequivocally to be actively harmful to the environment. We follow the news religiously because we want to be informed - but we never learn anything of value.

It's like there is a conspiracy to keep us docile and productive, to stop us thinking about our lives. Sometimes when you do something weird like becoming a Buddhist, people almost seemed threatened that you would do anything which upsets the status quo - like not eating meat. We are conditioned with values some of which have no real value.

But given the fact of our own death, and subsequent anonymity, isn't it important to consider what we are doing with our lives? So what would it be like to just stop for a minute and consider what's really important? In some stories about the early life of the Buddha he was stopped in his tracks by the realisation that everyone he loved was just going to die no matter what he did. His response was not to go into denial or self-pity, he did not bury himself in work or in booze. His response was to face the problem directly and undertake a thorough exploration of what is truly valuable. He found a way to live in accordance with these values. Buddhists are sometimes criticised because the Buddha left his wife and child behind to do something selfish. But this could not be further from the truth. The Buddha made a very great sacrifice for his family. In those stories (which may well be apocryphal) he gave up everything for his family, and having solved the problem of suffering came back to teach them the way beyond death as well. There can be no higher fulfilment of family duty or filial piety. And yet after self-doubt and low self-esteem, family and career responsibilities are perhaps the biggest barrier to spiritual commitment that there are. Even though we accept the Buddha's teaching we cannot shake off the values absorbed from our society.

You will sometimes get blithe spirits who say something like: "never mind, I do it in my next life." I find this unlikely. If karma works at all, then it is our choices which drive it. By leaving something undone in this life you most likely create the conditions for not having the opportunity to do it in a next life. We are working against a current which will drag us down unless we make a positive effort. To put something worthy off thinking that the opportunity will present itself again is to abdicate responsibility, and this sets up conditions for the future.

We would do well to consider death, especially our own deaths. No-one ever said on their deathbed - "I wish I'd spent more time at the office!". I think death provides some perspective on how we organise our lives, and on what we seek to achieve in this life. This life is a precious opportunity. I'll finish with some words from Evans-Wenz's translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead:

O procrastinating one, who thinketh not of the coming of death,
Devoting thyself to the useless doings of this life,
Improvident art thou in dissipating thy great opportunity;
Mistaken, indeed, will thy purpose be now if thou returnest empty-handed from this life:
Since the Holy Dharma is known to be thy true need,
Wilt thou not devote thyself to the Holy Dharma even now?

Note: since writing this a few weeks ago the H5N1 flu strain has been in the news, but I don't think it changes our existential situation.


image: cemetery by Jayarava

Everything is on fire!

The discourse that I am going to explore today is, according to Therevāda tradition, the third spoken by the Buddha after his awakening. In it he establishes one of the fundamental metaphors of the whole Buddhist canon. The short title of the Sutta is the Āditta Sutta, but it is also known as the Āditta-pariyāya Sutta: The Discourse on the Way of Putting Things as Being on Fire, or we might say The Fire Metaphor. (SN 35.28, PTS iv.19). It is usually known in English as the Fire Sermon - a full translation is included at the end of this post. "The Fire Sermon" always makes me think of fire and brimstone, and as we will see the two are not so far apart!

The Buddha addresses the bhikkhus and says: "everything is ablaze" (sabbaṃ ādittaṃ). Although it is said to be early, this sutta is one of a series of texts (no.28 in fact) that explore sabbaṃ - 'everything, the whole, all'. There is a parallel here with a Vedic idiom. Sabbaṃ in Sanskrit is sarvam, often used in the phrase idaṃ sarvaṃ 'all this'. Compare this verse from the oldest parts of the Ṛgveda (RV 8.58.2):

éka evā́gnír bahudhā́ sámiddha
ékaḥ sū́ryo víśvam ánu prábhūtaḥ
ékaivóṣā́ḥ sárvam idáṃ ví bhāti
ékaṃ vā́ idáṃ ví babhūva sárvam

Only one fire kindles many times.
One sun is all penetrating.
Dawns as one, shine on all this.
From this one, unfolds the whole.

It may be that the Buddha was consciously using a Vedic idiom in the Fire Sermon - purposefully parodying this kind of religious view, especially as it coincides with a fire metaphor. However fire is probably a universal metaphor and it's appearance in any one text may not be significant. The 'sarvam' idiom is also common in the Upaniṣads.

Returning to the Pāli we find that sabbaṃ can be used in several different ways, each of are subtlety different aspects of totality: “whole, entire, all, every". Sabbaṃ is most typically 'the whole'. When used to mean 'all' it has colonised the semantic field of the Sanskrit word viśva - a similar process seems to happen in many Indo-European Languages. This sequence of suttas dealing with sabbaṃ uses all of the definitions of sabbaṃ. However here sabbaṃ as defined by the Buddha includes only the senses, and their objects - ear, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind; forms, sounds, smells, tastes, touches, mental activity (dharmas). Collectively these are known as the twelve 'āyatana' - the meeting places or bases; or if we include the respective sense consciousnesses the eighteen dhātu.

This might seem a narrow definition of 'everything', but it takes into account the perceptual situation. The Buddha doesn't deny the objective world (and therefore non-dualist interpretations of Buddhism seem to me to miss the mark) but he says that all we can know about that world comes through the senses and is processed by the mind. As such he is not a pure idealist, since he doesn't deny the objective per se. 'Everything' in this sense is everything that we can know, and is also what constitutes our 'world' (loka), that is our personal subjective world.

Everything - the senses and their objects, and the mind which perceives them; and what arises in the mind as a result of perception - are ablaze. They are the fuel of the fire. And with what are they ablaze? (kiñca sabbaṃ āditto). They are ablaze firstly with the fires (aggi) of greed (rāga), hatred (dosa), and ignorance (moha). This triad, known as kilesa (Sanskrit kleśa) are universally acknowledged in Buddhism as the roots of the problems of human beings. However the Buddha continues on to say that everything is ablaze with the fires of birth, old age and death (jātiyā jarāya maraṇena), and with all forms of unhappiness: grief, lamenting, misery, dejection, and trouble (soka-parideva-dukkha-domanass-upāyāsā). So the fire is the causes and effects of spiritual ignorance, the rounds of rebirth (and redeath) and the unsatisfactoriness of being ignorant of the nature of experience.

It is typical of the sutta form for the Buddha to first set out a problem and then show how it can be resolved. In this case it is through seeing this (evaṃ passaṃ). Seeing it one becomes weary of it (nibbindati). Nibbindati is often translated as revulsion (by Bhikkhu Bodhi for instance). This captures the intensity of the emotion, but gives it a far too negative a cast for my taste. The word can mean "is weary of, satiated, turns away" - in my own idiom I might say "fed-up". Seeing the fire and fuel burning away, one becomes thoroughly fed-up with being burned, and turns away from it. Turning away one detaches from it (virajjhati). Virāga (detachment) is the opposite of being caught up in the passions (rāga) - passions very much in the old fashion sense of something overtaking you, and taking you over against your will. Being free of passions one is liberated (vimuccati), and one knows that one is liberated.

Now the word is not used in this text, but it's clear that the metaphor finds it's apotheosis in the term nibbāṇa. The origin of this term is clearer in Sanskrit: nirvāna. Vāna is from the root √vā 'to blow', and nir- (actually nis- but sandhi changes it to nir- when followed by v) meaning "out, forth, away": nirvāṇa, then, means "to blow out". What is blown out is the fire described here - it is clearly not the blowing out of 'being' or of the person or personality or the ego. Nirvāṇa then is not at all nihilistic - unless the absence of greed, hatred and delusion is nihilistic! The ideas being expressed here owe a great deal to the work of Richard Gombrich - who has especially pointed out the ubiquity of the fire metaphor and some of the ways it is employed. I have already written about the fire metaphor and the nidāna chain before: Playing with Fire [16.05.08].

Clearly in terms of method this sutta is short on detail. Although one could say that the Buddhist program is just this: becoming fed-up with suffering and turning away from the causes of it; in practice we have to have a little more help than this. There are lots of methods that we can employ to help us along the way. What this sutta does do quite nicely is give us an overview of the problem and the solution, of what I have been calling the Buddhist program. Perhaps for this reason it is celebrated amongst Buddhists.

Readings

The Āditta Sutta (SN 35.28, PTS S iv.19) is translated by Bhikkhu Bodhi in The Connected Discourses of the Buddha, Wisdom Publications, 2000, p.1143. Bhikkhu Thanissaro's translation is available on Access to Insight. I used the Pāli text from www.tipitaka.org for my translations.

Ṛgveda quote from the online version of Thomson, Karen and Slocum, 2008. The Rigveda: Metrically Restored Text. Translation is mine.

Information on the sarvam idiom from essays by Jan Gonda

• Gonda, J. 1955. ‘Reflections on Sarva- in Vedic Texts’. Indian Linguistics 16(Nov) : 53-71
• Gonda, J. 1982. ‘All, Universe, and Totality in the Śatapatha-Brāhmana’. Journal of the Oriental Institute 32(1-2): 1-17

The Fire Sutta

Once the Blessed one was dwelling at Gaya, on Gaya’s Head, with one thousand monks. There the Blessed One addressed the monks:

Monks, everything is ablaze! And what is everything? The eye, forms, eye-consciousness, eye-contact, those sensations that arise from eye-contact whether pleasant or unpleasant or neutral. All these are ablaze. Ablaze with what? They are ablaze with the fires of craving, hatred, and ignorance; with the fires of birth, old-age and death; with the fires of grief, lamenting, misery, dejection, and trouble.

Similarly the ear, the nose, the tongue, the body and the mind; and sounds, smells, tastes, contact and thoughts, etc are ablaze.

When they see things in this way, the noble disciples are fed up with the senses, and their objects, and sense consciousness, and contact, and what arises from contact - whether pleasant or unpleasant or neutral. And being fed-up with it all they lose interest. Losing interest they are free from those influences, and they know themselves to be free. They understand: “birth is cut off, the spiritual life has been lived, what should be done has been done, this state of being is no more”.

This is what the Blessed One said.

Delighted, those monks rejoiced in what the Blessed One said. Moreover, during the exposition their minds were freed from the fires [1] by removing the fuel [2].

Notes

1. Here I am translating āsava as ‘fires’ to link it to the fires of greed (raga), hatred (dosa) and ignorance (moha) mentioned earlier in the text. The āsavas are sensuality (kāma), becoming (bhava), ignorance (avijjā) and, sometimes, views (diṭṭha). The fires mentioned above are a different list known as the kilesā or defilements. Although the āsavas and the kilesas only partially overlap, they are clearly getting at the same kind of thing i.e. that our responses to the senses and their objects is what binds us to saṃsara.
2. Anupādāya is more literally “not taken hold of” or “not appropriated”. With reference to the fire metaphor however upādā suggests the fuel which supports the fire. And anupādā would then be “not taking up any more fuel”. Pali-English Dictionary s.v. upādā, upādāna and upādāya.

image: by jayarava

From the Beginning Nothing Arises.

Some time back I wrote a blog post on a quote from the Mahāvairocana Abhisaṃbodhi Tantra (MAT): The Essence of all Mantras. Recently I was reflecting on the idea that the syllable 'a' is the essence of all mantras in light of my studies of Sanskrit.

In the MAT the phrase is, in Stephen Hodge's translation:

"I declare that A is the essence of all mantras, and from it arise mantras without number; and it produces in entirety the Awareness which stills all conceptual proliferations".[1]

Previous explanations of this phrase are based on two ideas: first that unmodified consonants in the Sanskrit alphabet assume the vowel 'a'; or second, that 'a' added to any adjective or noun causes it to mean the opposite. These don't seem explain the claim that 'a' is the essence of all mantras. The syllable 'a' is not involved either phonetically or graphically in the other vowels sounds, and added to a verb usually indicates the past imperfect tense. I have put forward the theory that this idea makes more sense in an environment in which the Gāndhārī [2] language and Kharoṣṭhī script were used: where the character for 'a' is modified by diacritic marks to indicate other vowels.

Here I want to explore a link to the Perfection of Wisdom tradition by examining one of the phrases which make up the alphabetic acrostic of the Arapacana poem as found in the Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra - the Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra in 25,000 Lines (hereafter the 25kPP). The first five lines go like this:

akāro mukhaḥ sarvadharmāṇāṃ ādyanutpannatvāt
repho mukhaḥ sarvadharmāṇāṃ rajo 'pagatatvāt
pakāro mukhaḥ sarvadharmāṇāṃ paramārtha nirdeśāt
cakāro mukhaḥ sarvadharmāṇāṃ cyavanopapattyanupalabdhitvāt
nakaro mukhaḥ sarvadharmāṇāṃ nāmāpagatatvāt

Clearly there is a pattern here. Akāro, repho, pakāro etc are the names of the syllables in Sanskrit (r being irregular). Sarvadharmāṇām is a compound of sarva + dharma in the genitive plural case - roughly 'of all dharmas'. Conze's translation into English remains the only accessible one and he translated the first phrase as: "The syllable A is a door to the insight that all dharmas are unproduced from the very beginning".

Conze has not just translated the words, he has interpreted them - there is nothing to correspond to "the insight that" in the Sanskrit. The grammatical relationship suggests that the letters are indeed the 'mukhaḥ' of all dharmas, but here we need to tread carefully. Firstly my regular readers will know that dharma is a very ambiguous term that can be translated rather differently under different circumstances. I have pointed out that in many cases that dharmas (plural) should be taken to be what arises in dependence on causes (the primary focus of the Buddha's insights and teaching), and further that it is better to think of dharmas in this sense as the units of conscious experience - they are the building bricks of our subjective 'world'. I think that this definition might apply here also, but before I go into this we need to explore this word 'mukha'.

Mukha is almost a slippery as dharma. Since we know that the language of the Wisdom alphabet was originally a Prakrit rather than Classical Sanskrit we need to consult more widely than Sanskrit dictionaries in defining this word. I have consulted Monier-Williams' Sanskrit Dictionary, Edgerton's Buddhist-Hybrid Sanskrit Dictionary and the Pāli-English Dictionary (PED). Definitions largely overlap except for one specific case. The PED provides the most useful summary of the meanings:

1. mouth
2. face, or of the face
3. opening, metaphorically a means of income
4. cause, ways, means, reason
5. front, top, head (and hence:)
6. pinnacle, best part, foremost, top most.

Conze has chosen to render mukha as 'door' and the reason for this may be that in the 25kPP mukha occurs with another term which suggests that they might be synonyms: "akṣaramukham akṣarapraveśaḥ" (25kPP 21.2.08). Akṣara is 'syllable' in both cases. Praveśa can mean "entering, entrance, penetration or intrusion into". It is quite common in Pāli texts to use two synonyms like this for emphasis - although often commentators feel compelled to make hair splitting differences between the two. However 'Door' is not the most obvious translation of mukha even under these circumstances. Salomon translates it 'head' in one of his papers on the Arapacana Alphabet for instance, although I do not think this is right either.

Let's step back for a minute and explore the context which in this case is meditation. The words of the acrostic are an aide de memoire for meditation. This is brought our quite clearly in a later passage (420 pages later in Conze's translation!). Here the text makes it clear that the reader should be meditating "on the 42 letters" [3]. If one reads through all of the lines it becomes clear that this is a meditation on emptiness: or to be quite specific it is a meditation designed to reveal that dharmas are empty of svabhāva or independent existence. This is not different from my own approach to dhammas relying on Pāli texts. Because dharmas are the subjective aspects of experience and nothing substantial arises in the process of having an experience, nothing is defiled, nothing is beyond this, nothing ceases, there is nothing to pin a label on (these are rough translations of the first five lines of the Arapacana). That is to say the subject for contemplation is not the nature of Reality, but the nature of experience.

So the letter 'a' reminds us of the word anutpanna (non-arisen) which expands to the line akāro mukhaḥ sarvadharmāṇāṃ ādyanutpannatvāt, and the overall idea is to contemplate the notion that within experience nothing substantial or independent arises. Conze's suggestion, then, that the syllable 'a' is a door, even a door to insight, is not completely implausible. However praveśa suggests not simply an entrance, but a penetration into something - ie an insight - into the meaning of the words. The syllable 'a' certainly provides a reminder, and perhaps we could see it as providing a way into insight. Perhaps then mukha is being used in the sense of 'means' or 'opportunity'? Another possibility comes from the BHS dictionary where Edgerton suggests that another way of reading the word is 'introduction' or 'ingress'. It could be that the meditation practice is seen as having two phases - introduction to the concept, and penetration to the consequences of it.

Conze says that "all dharmas are unproduced from the very beginning", but I don't think this is quite what was intended. Let's take apart this complex compound ādyanutpannatvāt and see what it says: ādi + an + ud + panna + tva + āt. The prefix ādi means 'beginning or commencement'. An + utpanna is just the opposite of utpanna, and utpanna is ud + panna (d changes to t before p) which is 'rising up' or 'arising'. So anutpana is 'not rising up'. Now -tva is a suffix used to form abstract nouns: if god is the noun, then divinity is the abstract noun. You could also translate -tva as -ness. If a stone is hard then it exhibits hardness. And -āt is an ablative suffix - it can express the English 'from' or 'because of'. So putting things back together: anutpannatva means 'having the quality of not arising'. Adding ādi gives us Conze's "from the very beginning".

I would translate the whole phrase:

akāro mukhaḥ sarvadharmāṇāṃ ādyanutpannatvāt

the syllable a is an opening because of the primal quality of not arising of all dharmas.

This is not so different to Conze. There is an ambiguity: sarvadharmāṇāṃ is a genitive plural "of all dharmas" and it could mean the 'opening of all dharmas...' or 'the primal quality of not arising of all dharmas.' Conze chose the former, but it occurs to me that the latter needs to be considered as a possibility, and works better in my opinion - I'm a beginner and Conze was a very experienced linguist and translator, but, even so.

It is interesting to note that the text has effectively become esoteric - i.e. it cannot be understood as it stands. One needs a little Sanskrit, and to have studied the text with a view to the Arapacana meditation. It does yield up it's secrets to study, but not to the casual reader. I have examined all of the published occurrences of the Arapacana. I don't have access to the many unpublished manuscripts. The manuscript from Bajaur which will no doubt provide more insights when published as it is the oldest known Arapacana. In my opinion the incorporation of a working Arapacana meditation in the 25kpp links it to the Gandhāra area - recall that no other alphabetical lists are known in ancient Indian texts.

My view is that this tradition represents a continuous line of development from early Buddhism which preserves the essential elements of the original. The crucial notions are that dharmas are units of experience, and that the important thing is to the workings of experience from the subjective pole (as opposed to trying to describe 'reality'). But the particular tradition withers and, I think, dies. Traces of the Arapacana tradition survive for hundreds of years, but are increasingly abstract. Between the Mahāvairocana Abhisaṃbodhi Tantra (ca mid 7th century) and the next major Tantric text, the Sarvatathāgata-Tatvasaṃgraha Tantra (ca late 7th - early 8th century), the whole alphabet gets paired down to just the syllable 'a'. In the 25kPP the meditation is on all of the syllables of the Gāndhārī alphabet - it is a complex task to remember the 42 (or 43 or 44) lines. And the 25kPP itself says that all of these reflections point to the same truth. So the whole thing got pared down to: akāro mukhaḥ sarvadharmāṇāṃ ādyanutpannavāt. As I have remarked elsewhere the line later became embedded in bījas and was turned into a mantra: oṃ akāro mukhaṃ sarvadharmāṇāṃ ādyanutpannatvāt āḥ hūṃ phaṭ svāhā. This form crops up in contexts which appear completely dissociated from its origins in Gandhāra.

[1] Note that the purpose is to still proliferations. I don't have space to link this with last week's essay on proliferation, but the connection is an interesting one.
[2]My spelling of Gandhāra and Gāndhārī have been somewhat erratic in the past - I think I have it right in this essay and will endeavour to correct it in past essays as time permits.
[2] The text does indeed say 42, although most versions of the Arapacana have 43 or 44, and the one in this text has 44. It's not clear why this discrepancy exists.

Note: A complete and reliable edited Sanskrit text of the Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra is not yet available, and access to manuscripts is out of the question for someone like me. Dutt's edition is complete but unreliable - for instance the Arapacana has two duplications of syllables. Another edition is in the process of being edited by Takayasu Kimura, but the volume which contains the Arapacana is not yet published, although the other related passages are available in Kimura (I haven't had a chance to compare them yet).


image: Seed-syllable āṃḥ - combines the syllables a, ā, aṃ, aḥ which represent the four stages of the path in the Mahāvairocana Abhisaṃbodhi Tantra, and therefore symbolises their culmination and apotheosis as embodied by Mahāvairocana.

Proliferation - the stories we tell ourselves about experience

The Madhupiṇḍika or Honeyball Sutta* is one of the most important texts in the Pāli Canon. In it the Buddha's maternal uncle Daṇḍāpāni asks what the Buddha teaches. The name Daṇḍapāni may well be a joke since it means rod in hand, or even the punishing hand, and the Buddha replies that he teaches in a way that on does not quarrel with anyone in the world. But more specifically and more importantly he teaches a way to be free of craving, to be detached from sensual pleasures. Some of the bhikkhus find the sermon a bit terse and so they ask Mahā Kaccāna, who is known as the foremost expounder in full of brief sayings of the Buddha, to give a further explanation. He says:

‘‘Cakkhuñcāvuso, paṭicca rūpe ca uppajjati cakkhuviññāṇaṃ, tiṇṇaṃ saṅgati phasso, phassapaccayā vedanā, yaṃ vedeti taṃ sañjānāti , yaṃ sañjānāti taṃ vitakketi, yaṃ vitakketi taṃ papañceti, yaṃ papañceti tatonidānaṃ purisaṃ papañcasaññāsaṅkhā samudācaranti atītānāgatapaccuppannesu cakkhuviññeyyesu rūpesu. MN i.111.

It translates roughly as

"dependent (paṭicca) on the eye and forms, eye-consciousness arises: these three together constitute contact (phassa), which causes sensations (vedanā). Sensations are perceived (sañjānāti), and perceptions are reflected on (vitakka**), and reflections proliferate (papañceti). Because the eye is always recognising forms, a man is beset by ideas about, and definitions of, what is proliferated".

The formula is repeated for the other senses and the mind. Now the precise meaning of papañca is still disputed by scholars, but it is generally taken to mean something like "mental proliferation". I think of it as something like associations. By linking present experience with associations we create the stories we tell ourselves about the experiences we are having. So we have a sensation, and the register it and reflect on it, and we then associate that with past experiences, and expectations, and habitual responses, and the result is that we incorporate the sensation into our personal narrative - what we might call our 'world' (loka). Not that much, if any, of this happens consciously.

The Buddha had earlier explained that

‘‘Yatonidānaṃ, bhikkhu, purisaṃ papañcasaññāsaṅkhā samudācaranti. Ettha ce natthi abhinanditabbaṃ abhivaditabbaṃ ajjhositabbaṃ. Esevanto rāgānusayānaṃ, esevanto paṭighānusayānaṃ, esevanto diṭṭhānusayānaṃ , esevanto vicikicchānusayānaṃ, esevanto mānānusayānaṃ, esevanto bhavarāgānusayānaṃ, esevanto avijjānusayānaṃ, esevanto daṇḍādāna-satthādāna-kalaha-viggaha-vivāda-tuvaṃtuvaṃ-pesuñña-musāvādānaṃ. Etthete pāpakā akusalā dhammā aparisesā nirujjhantī’ti. MN i.110

"As to the ideas about, and definitions of, what is proliferated which assail a man: if there are no objects of pleasure, nothing to welcome, or to cling to then the bias towards pleasure is left behind, the bias towards reactivity is left behind, the biases towards views, uncertainty, comparisons and conceit, the desire for continued becoming, ignorance are left behind; giving out punishments, fighting, quarrels, disputes, contention, blame, slander and lying are left behind. These evil unskilful states are completely destroyed."

So here the Buddha is rather tersely explaining that being caught up in our own stories about the 'world' (really our own 'world') we are led to actions which are harmful to us and others. In order to give up these states we have to stop seeking out pleasure, stop being fixated with it, and stop clinging to it. This is a subtle point which might be mistaken for a kind of dour puritanism.

The problem is not pleasure per se. Pleasure is not bad. It is our attitude towards pleasurable experiences which causes us difficulties. Sensations are largely involuntary - if not in a deep sleep then we constantly experience sensations over which we have little control, except perhaps which sensations we focus on. We are surrounded by objects of the senses, and we are constantly in contact with them. We swim in sensory experience just like a fish in water.

The problem is the stories we tell ourselves, mostly unconsciously, about the nature of these sensations. These stories come from our surrounding culture, our social group and from our families. We are this kind of person, but not that kind. We like this kind of thing and not that kind. Some of us are so convinced about their story that we will kill on the basis of these beliefs, but all of us will quarrel and fight, and on occasion will be unskilful in order to defend our 'world'. Unfortunately we are so strongly inculcated with these views that we don't even see them as views, let alone question them. Where people do question them, they often seem to lack the vision to find a better answer.

In fact most of us don't get along very well without pleasure. Some of us go a bit mad when we deny ourselves pleasure. The middle way is not to deny or indulge in pleasurable sensations, but to see sensations, and experiences for what they are. Experiences - ie the coming together of sense, object and consciousness - are impermanent. Even if the stimulus behind a sensation remains constant, our relationship to it changes. A good example is tinnitus - the constant ringing in the ears that many of us have due to listening to loud music. It is constant, but sometimes we notice it and sometimes not; sometimes it is annoying or even exasperating, sometimes it is neutral. Experience shifts and swirls and each moment of awareness is different from the next.

As I explained last week [How is Suffering created?] - we associate happiness with pleasure. This is one of the most dangerous stories that we tell ourselves, one of the most destructive associations we make. Because it makes pleasure important to us. We'll fight to get it, fight with those we perceive as denying it to us, and fight to hold on to what we have. We don't even imagine that pleasure being a vedanā (ie a mental event) is impermanent. We welcome pleasure and we cling to it, or try to. What Kaccāna does is to put this in the context of the mechanics of experience. Pleasure is not something we have control over, not something we can hold on to.

Likewise we are reactive towards painful experiences. I think we need to be clear that if you're literally on fire then it is vital to put out the flames. But painful sensations are as involuntary as pleasurable. Having been burned we should be ready to experience the pain of the burn. This is a huge ask at times. Sometimes the pain of the moment is too much to bear, as I wrote about in my essay [When awareness is too much to bear]. But the problem is that when we try to suppress awareness of some sensations we are less alive to our experience. Denial creates unconsciousness which becomes a vicious circle - and how vicious this can become is obvious to anyone tuning into the news media.

So we have these biases: thirst for pleasure, reactivity towards pain, and this is both a result of, and a condition for, the continuation of the stories we tell ourselves about what we are experiencing. But since the stories aren't consistent with the nature of experience, then we find ourselves constantly being disappointed or confused. Part of the Buddhist method is to slow down and just pay attention to that raw experience. If necessary label it: pleasant, painful, neutral. And watch our reaction to it - drawn towards, react away? It's usually one or the other. The aim of this stage of practice is to attain equanimity towards experiences, in order to prepare us for the next step, which is to start getting into the workings of the process.


Notes

* Madhupiṇḍika Sutta, Majjhima Nikāya no.18 (PTS MN i.111.). In the translation by Bikkhus Ñāṇamoli and Bodhi it is on pg 201. It is also translated by Bhikkhu Thanissaro on Access to Insight with a lengthy and useful introduction.

** Vitakka and reflect have very similar etymologies. See my essay Communicating the Dharma.

image: honey bee from autan on Flickr.