Jayarava's Raves

One of my bigger projects at the moment is an article on the problem of Action at a Temporal Distance. This is the contradiction between pratītyasamutpāda requiring the presence of a condition for the effect and karma which requires the manifestation of the effect long after the condition has ceased (with no intervening manifestation of the effect).

Having dealt with the Sarvāstivāda approach to this problem it will be interesting to see how other schools managed. In this essay I'll look into the Theravāda Abhidhamma to see how they dealt with Action at a Temporal Distance. Where the Sarvāstivādins dealt with the problem explicitly, the Theravādins do so only implicitly, and spread the answer out so that it's not so obvious. Indeed it's so obscure that some respected modern scholars have missed it entirely!

It's fairly common to see Theravāda Dhamma books referring to the accumulation (āyūhana) of kamma over time. Other terms like latent tendencies (anusaya) and karmic formations (saṅkhārā) seem to hint at something similar. In particular saṅkhārā appears to be made up from an accumulation of cetanā. The problem here is that these kinds of answers simply shift attention without solving the problem. The question shifts from "where is kamma in the interim between cetanā and vipāka?"; to "where is anusaya or āyūhana?" If there is an accumulation of something, where and/or how does it accumulate; and why does it not affect the person until the karma ripens? Something happens to hold over the effect (vipāka) long after the cetanā that conditions it has ceased, in contradiction of the fundamental principle of conditionality. The standard answers are simply linguistic substitutions. Other commentators have noticed that there is a problem here.

"Questions about the persistence of latent dispositions and accumulation of karmic potential thus remain: once the cognitive processes are activated, are they transmitted through the six modes of cognitive awareness? If so, why do they not influence these forms of mind? If not, how do they persist from one moment of bhavaṅga-citta to the next without some contiguous conditioning medium? The bhavaṅga-citta does not directly address these persisting questions, adumbrated in the Kathavātthu so many centuries before. Nor, to my knowledge, do subsequent Theravādin Abhidhamma traditions discuss these questions in dhammic terms."
Waldron, William S. Buddhist Unconscious: The Ālaya-vijñāna in the Context of Indian Buddhist Thought. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. p.83.

The bhavaṅgacitta is like a resting state of the mind when there is no sense experience. Like sense cittas, the bhavaṅga-cittas are short-lived and one follows another in succession. Unlike sense cittas, the bhavaṅgacittas all have the same object as the paṭisandhicitta or relinking-mental event that was the first conscious event to arise in our freshly minted being after the final or death-moment conscious event (cuticitta) of our last being. Unlike sensory cittas, bhavaṅgacitta doesn't register as vedanā. Thus even when we are not consciously having experiences—such as in deep sleep or arūpa-jhāna—there is a steady stream of mental events that we are not aware of that provide continuity between moments of sense awareness.

Waldron invokes the stream of bhavaṅgacitta (or bhavaṅgasota) but it's hard to see how it can responsibility for accumulation if each bhavaṅgacitta is identical.

"...it does not seem possible on the basis of what is said explicitly in the texts to justify the claim that the bhavaṅga carries with it all character traits, memories, habitual tendencies, etc." (30).
Gethin, Rupert. (1994) 'Bhavaṅga and Rebirth According to the Abhidhamma.' in The Buddhist Forum. Vol III. T. Skorupski and U. Pagel (eds.), London: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, pp. 11–35.

However Gethin is alive to the need for something to do this job or perhaps we should say, for this function to be carried out somehow. Since bhavaṅgacittas all have the same object they aren't much use for the kind of connectivity with accumulation we are looking for. But they are not a million miles away. Gethin finds it inconceivable that the great Theravādin commentators, Buddhaghosa, Buddhadatta, and Dhammapala, had not considered the problem, and he ventures to speculate a little on how they might have solved it. Like Gethin, I'm interested that the great three seem not to have openly dealt with the problem in the way that Sarvāstivādins did. Buddhaghosa is nothing if not thorough.

For Gethin there are many similarities between bhavaṅga and ālayavijñāna (the solution to the problem of Action at a Temporal Distance adopted by Yogacārins, based on the Sautrāntika idea of 'karmic seeds'). Thus he is willing to entertain the thought that the two at least "belong to the same complex of ideas within the history of Buddhist thought." (35). I agree on this last point. However I think we can go further.

Firstly a reminder that in Dhammavāda there are four kinds of dhamma: citta, cetasika, rūpa and nibbāna. Importantly for us, each citta though itself singular and occurring strictly in series, has a variable number of associated cetasikas. What the Buddha calls kamma is cetanā, which is classified as a cetasika. So each citta has associated with it a cetanā that makes it morally significant. Just to be clear a citta is a mental event and a cetanā is the intentional function of that mental event. With this in mind we can look at what some of the traditional sources tell us about the accumulation of kamma.

Buddhaghosa provides a quote from the Paṭisambhidāmagga that looks promising. At Visuddhimagga (Vsm) XVII.292:

Tenāha ‘‘purimakammabhavasmiṃ moho avijjā, āyūhanā saṅkhārā, nikanti taṇhā, upagamanaṃ upādānaṃ, cetanā bhavoti ime pañca dhammā purimakammabhavasmiṃ idha paṭisandhiyā paccayā’’ti (Ps 1.47).

Hence it is said: 'In the previous kamma-process becoming, there is delusion, which is ignorance; there is accumulation (āyūhanā) which is formations (saṅkhārā); there is attachment, which is craving; there is embracing, which is clinging (upādāna); there is volition (cetanā) which is becoming (bhava); thus these five things in the previous kamma-process becoming are conditions for the rebirth-linking here [in the present becoming]. (PTS Ps i.52). trans. Ñāṇamoli

Elsewhere the commentary on the Saṅkhārasuttaṃ, AN 3.23 (Mp 2.192), Buddhaghosa glosses the phrase kāyasaṅkhāraṃ abhisaṅkharoti with:

Kāyasaṅkhāranti kāyadvāre cetanārāsiṃ:
The body-formation [is] "a heap of intentions in the body-door”.

Abhisaṅkharotīti āyūhati rāsiṃ karoti piṇḍaṃ karoti.
The verb abhisaṅkharoti [means] he accumulates, he makes a heap, he makes a lump.”

This points towards saṅkhārakkhandha as the process by which cetanā accumulates. But I still don't see where this fits into the cittavīthi (or the track of mental events). A problem here is that kamma accumulations are not supposed to take effect until the kamma ripens, creating a vipāka. The idea that kamma accumulates as saṅkhārā is attractive, but there is a contradiction since the saṅkhārā is actively involved in the perceptual process. The experience of the vipāka is supposed to be a one-time thing: it ripens and we either experience it as vedanā or we experience it as gati (rebirth destination) and then it is expended. If it were not expended then there would never be a way to escape from previous negative karma. This is complicated because clearly habitual tendencies (positive and negative) are a phenomenon that everyone experiences. They're also centrally important in cultivating a Buddhist lifestyle and the pursuit of liberation from greed, aversion and confusion.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with the idea that a kamma stays active for a period and has an effect while active; and then once it is exhausted ceases to be active. But that's not what the texts describe. And the same limitations apply: the kamma qua event is short-lived and if it is to accumulate we have to find a way to pass on the effect without the continued existence of the condition. Effects are said to accumulate despite the absence of their conditions which, being mental events, exist only in the moment.

In Early Buddhist Metaphysics, in the chapter "Causation as the Handmaid of Metaphysics" Noa Ronkin summarises the 24 types of conditions as found in the seventh book of the Abhidhamma, the Paṭṭhāna. This seems to be the key to understanding the Theravāda response to Action at a Temporal Distance. The functions of accumulating and passing forward kamma are distributed amongst several different types of conditionality. The approach relies on the idea that dhammas can operate as a condition in many different modes. Twenty-four such modes are discussed in the Paṭṭhāna.

Under her discussion of the pair proximity condition (antara-paccaya) and contiguity condition (samantara-paccaya), Ronkin says, "Every preceding thought moment is thus regarded as capable of arousing succeeding states of consciousness similar to it in the immediately following instant." (216). She further speculates that these two, almost identical, modes of conditionality were "probably necessary in order to account for the continuity of phenomena without relying on any metaphysical substance". (216) Buddhaghosa covers this subject in Visuddhimagga XVII.73-6 (Vol 2, para 598 in the VRI ed.) Buddhaghosa spends some time refuting an internal dispute regarding the need for temporal proximity. The fact that Theravādins were not united on this issue of temporal proximity is telling. It shows that they were actively considering the problem of Action at a Temporal Distance and divided over how to solve it. If we follow through the rest of the paccaya modes we find more specific links of this kind.

The decisive support condition (upanissaya-paccaya) allows a dhamma to self-sufficiently arouse a resultant dhamma, like the related nissaya-paccaya but not necessarily foremost and "it lasts longer, has long-term effect and implies action at a distance... The importance of the decisive support condition seems to lie in its accounting for more and spiritual progress: virtues like trust or confidence (saddhā), generosity (dāna), undertaking the precepts and others, all assist the occurrence of their long term results (the jhānas, insight, taking the path etc) as their decisive support, and these results, in their turn, condition the repeated arising of trust, generosity etc. (219, emphasis added). As the Paṭṭhāna says:

purimā purimā kusalā dhammā pacchimānaṃ pacchimānaṃ kusalānaṃ dhammānaṃ upanissayapaccayena paccayo.

"All preceding wholesome dhammas are a condition by way of decisive support condition of all subsequent wholesome dhammas" (i.5)

Similarly for unwholesome (akusala) and undetermined (avyākata) dhammas. This section is covered in Visuddhimagga XVII 80-84. This criteria of self-sufficiency is interesting since it seems to flirt with something like svabhāva. Here though a dhamma is not a condition for itself, but a condition for another which we would expect to be parabhāva, a term we do find in Nāgārjuna's discussion of conditionality. This aspect requires some more research, but it looks like an all or nothing problem such as Nāgārjuna describes for svabhāva.

We also have:

Habitual cultivation (āsevana-paccaya)... "for example, developing a certain skilful thought once facilitates the cultivation of the same thought with a greater degree of efficiency and intensity... It therefore underlies the cultivation of right view, right speech and right action." (Ronkin 219)

Habitual cultivation is thus also responsible for memory without an agent that remembers. Ronkin places this observation in a note (242 n.118), with a reference to an article in two parts by David Kalupahana (1962) 'The Philosophy of Relations in Buddhism'University of Ceylon Review: 19-54; 188-208. Kalupahana re-visited this material in his 1975 book: Causality: The Central Philosophy of Buddhism (Uni of Hawai'i Press), especially chapter VII "Causal Correlations". However compare:

"It is because of proximity-condition and contiguity-condition that we can remember past experiences, events which occurred many years ago." (38)

Gorkom, Nina van. (2010) The Conditionality of Life: An Outline of the Twenty-four Conditions as Taught in the Abhidhamma. Zolag.

This is troubling because the two commentators contradict each other. Buddhaghosa seems not to participate in this dispute. He mentions memory under neither heading. More research is required to untangle this knot, which only further emphasises the difficulty of dealing with the problems raised by Action at a Temporal Distance.

The kamma-paccaya occurs in two modes simultaneous (sahajāta) and asynchronous (nānākhaṇika)... and according to Ronkin:

"An asynchronous condition obtains when a past kamma comes into fruition in a manifest corresponding action. Although the volition itself ceases, it leaves in the mind latent traces that take effect and assist the arising of an appropriate action when the necessary conditions are satisfied" (220)

This is less satisfying because it does not explain the "latent trace" but I think the implication is clear enough in the light of the other passages.

Conclusions

The picture is that each citta is not a simple event, but a complex one with many facets (cetasikā). And each citta conditions the next in a variety of ways (twenty four different ways according to the Paṭṭhāna). Theravādins envisaged that an aspect of conditionality would be the passing on of information from citta to citta, particularly the information relevant to karma: information about cetanā. And this process is perfectly conservative in order that karma can be 100% effective. There is no loss of information until the conditions amassed in a life-time manifest as a single vipāka. This takes place at the moment of death when death-moment conscious-event (cuticitta) occurs and conditions the paṭisandhicitta or 're-linking mental event'. By focussing on the information content the Theravādins avoided positing an entity for storing information. And by denying any interval between death and rebirth they avoided the complicated and unsatisfactory metaphysics of the antarabhāva or interim state. Thus information is conserved even though no entity is.

The idea of continuity with no entities, nascent in the suttas, is fleshed out in the Paṭṭhāna. It's not so clear what Buddhaghosa intended in Vism., though he bases his exposition on the same sources. Also some modern commentators seem to interpret functions like memory as being related to different kinds of condition.

I'm still slightly puzzled that this problem is so prominent elsewhere, and yet here quite submerged and difficult to get at. However, when one considers how initially disturbing is the notion that the two fundamental doctrines of Buddhism contradict each other it may be that at the same time as solving the problem they swept it under the carpet.

However, on first acquaintance this solution to Action at a Temporal Distance is far from satisfactory. If citta is a kind of dhamma then it ought to be unitary and simple. How does such a simple, momentary event operate as a condition in twenty-four distinct ways simultaneously? But then a citta is not a simple event after all, because it is always accompanied by cetasikas which are also dhammas. So is a citta a dhamma or not?

We still have no knowledge of how the final conscious event in one mind conditions a first conscious event in another mind. Handing on information within one mind is somewhat intuitive, but transmitting it to a spatially separate mind is quite counter-intuitive. Every single person has first-hand experience of the first, while experience of the latter is reported by a very few witnesses that we have every reason to doubt.

Traditionalists seem not to have an answer to this. The best they can do is to state that they simply cannot imagine conscious processes ceasing with physical death, and so it seems "natural" that conscious events continue to happen so their must be a transfer somehow. This is what all believers in an afterlife think: the afterlife is all about acknowledging physical death but denying mental death (a trait observed already in quite young children). So this refusal to allow for one's inner life to cease, certainly has a long pedigree and is widely accepted, but it doesn't ever answer the question of "how". Indeed the question of how can often produce hostile anti-intellectual responses which attack the idea that questions like this can be answered. The afterlife must be taken on faith and the answers to probing questions about the afterlife are never satisfactorily answered, which undermines faith.

Another question for this model is, how does the mind know that any particular citta is to be the last in this life and thus take on the function of cuticitta? That last citta has to perform a special function so it must "know" that it is the last citta. It implies a peculiar kind of determinism. But it also implies a very simplistic view of death. For the ancients death is consistent with the cessation of observable bodily processes, particularly the breath, which I have explained in my essays on vitalism is the quintessence of a living thing. However we now know that one can stop breathing for many minutes and be resuscitated (which is from the Latin and means "to summon up again"). In the West we have long associated death with the cessation of the heartbeat. But the discovery of brainwaves led to more precise definitions related to brain activity. However even this is far from precise. Identifying the last moment of consciousness is impossible. In the last couple of years fMRI scanners have enabled us to perceive mental activity in people who are in persistent vegetative states.

A puzzling aspect of this model is the huge build up of information that would occur over a life time of responding to sensory cittas. If we have several cittas per second then the information being passed on from citta to citta grows exponentially (as we must "process" information about the information); especially if we consider that memory is a function of this process as well. Each citta passes on information about itself and information accumulated from all previous cittas. It seems implausible at best that such a process had sufficient bandwidth to transfer a lifetime's information in a fraction of a second, every fraction of a second without ever glitching. Let alone the information from uncounted lifetimes from the past.

We also need to acknowledge the obscurantism of the source texts. The Paṭṭhāna and the Visuddhimagga are both very difficult texts to read and comprehend. Which means that for the most part we are reliant on commentators to explain the intention of the authors. And the commentators apparently disagree.

Perhaps it is expecting too much of these very early theories to stand the test of time and the rigours of a modern philosophical inquiry? It's one thing to understand the Theravāda view on it's own terms, it's another altogether to accept it on those terms.

This inquiry raises important questions. We cannot both embrace modernity and these ancient ideas about mental functioning. Something has to give. I know many Buddhists are content to let it be modernity that gives way. Buddhist apologetics are proliferating at present in the face of the conflict. But there is always something two-faced about the rejection of modernity. We embrace modern medicine to stay alive while rejecting the idea that the mind is an emergent property of brain and body function, even though both are products of the same body of knowledge. How ironic that the internet is a prime tool for dismissing modern progress away from superstition towards reason. Perhaps this is because the internet is a sufficiently advanced technology that is seems like magic?

For the present we can just about have our cake and eat it too, but how long can this continue? Must we choose between anachronistic, superstitious, rejection of modernity; and a non-religious, humanist, scientific utopia? Or is their some middle ground?

~~oOo~~

This essay began life as a discussion on the Dhammawheel forum.

Thanks to those who contributed to the discussion.

In Sanskrit the main word for 'heart' is hṛd or the suffixed form hṛdaya. However most of us are also familiar with the word for faith, śraddhā, which we think means 'placing the heart'. Here the word for heart is śrad. Most sources suggest that the two words hṛd and śrad are in fact two forms of a single word that has undergone a series of phonetic transformations. However some sources suggest that there are two distinct roots. This word makes for an interesting case study in comparative linguistics and shows the kind of evidence that is used to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European. In this case the reconstructed root is written different ways: k̑ered- : k̑erd-, k̑ērd-, k̑r̥d-, k̑red-.

We need to note some conventions. Where a form is reconstructed and/or not actually attested it is frequently suffixed with an asterix: *kred. In order to distinguish phonemes or sounds from letters they are written between two forward slashes. Thus come has initial c but is pronounced /k/. Similarly c can be pronounced also as /s/. Linguists make a distinction between /ḱ/ or /k̑/ the palato-velar and /k/ the plain velar. The difference is the k sound in "scum" and "come". If you pay close attention to where your tongue is in your mouth as you pronounce these words you'll notice the tongue makes contact with the roof of the mouth further forward in the word "scum" and is the /ḱ/ sound. In English the two are allophones, meaning we don't hear the difference and don't notate it differently. This seems to be true of other Indo-European languages also, though the distinction is important in Proto-Indo-European (PIE) the putative mother language of all the present day and dead IE languages.

I'll begin with a survey of the various cognates in other Indo-European languages by family grouping. In Indo-Iranian we have several related forms:

Avestan:	zərəd		zraz-dā
Vedic:		śrad	śraddhā
Vedic:	hṛd(aya)
Gāndhārī:		*ṣa(d)	ṣadha
Pāli:			saddhā
Pāli:	hadaya

It's quite regular for Avesta to have /z/ where Sanskrit has /ś/. In Sanskrit dhā is plain root meaning 'place/put'. Perhaps because of the conservative nature of religion we can see this form throughout the Indo-European language family. We need to ask about the two distinct forms in Vedic. There are two possible explanations for this situation.

There was a progressive change /ḱ/ > /ś/ > /h/
The word came into Vedic twice: PIE /ḱ/ > /ś/ and /ḱ/ > /h/.

There is a regular change from PIE /k/ to Vedic /ś/ so we can quite easily explain kred> śrad. What we need to explain then is either /ś/ > /h/ or /ḱ/ > /h/.

sirt

srĭdĭce

serdtse

serce

srdce

seyr

šerdìs

ser̃de

As we move from west we find three other language family has the change from palatal stop to sibilant. The Armenian form is sirt. It's very easy for a voiced consonant /d/ to change to an unvoiced consonant /t/ with the same articulation (compare Latin pater - German fader - English father). Slavic languages follow a similar pattern: heart = Church Slavonic srĭdĭce; Russian serdtse; Polish serce; Slovak srdce. And finally the Baltic languages: Old Prussian seyr; Lithuanian šerdìs; Latvian ser̃de. We can see that in most of these words a vowel is interposed between the initial /s/ and /r/. Here, then, the initial consonant change is /ḱ/ > /s/

kartiyaaš

kardia

cordis
cord

cuore

cœur

corazón

coração

The Anatolian, Helenic and Italic families preserved the /k/ though this is often spelled 'c'. Thus we see Hittite kar-ti-ya-aš'heart'; Greek kardia (καρδία); Latin cordis (and credo 'trust, believe'). The Latin gives rise to Romance Language forms: French cœur; Italian cuore; Spanish corazón; Portuguese coração; Romanian cord. Note the dropping of the final stop in French and Italian. In Spain /d/ becomes /z/ and in Portuguese /d/ > /sh/. One can see how this might have come about in the sequence: /d/ > /dz/ > /z/ > /sh/. Initial /ḱ/ is preserved, though it may become the plain velar /k/. The notation is ambiguous.

Celtic similarly preserved initial /k/: Old Irish cretim; Cornish créz; Welsh craidd. Though the more common word for 'heart' in Welsh seems to be the unrelated calon.

Germanic languages change initial /k/ to /h/ which is interesting because this is just the change that we are looking for. There's no question of any communication between Germanic and Sanskrit, it's just a case of parallel evolution, but it's helpful to know that one of the transformations that an initial /ḱ/ can undergo is change to /h/. The Proto-Germanic form is *herton- (OEtD) The Germanic family is divided geographically. West Germany covers what's now Germany and Holland. East is represented by a single dead language, i.e. Gothic. North is all of the Scandinavian languages. Usually English has been considered to be part of the West Germanic sub-family, related to Old Saxon. However more recently a case has been made to consider it part of the Northern sub-family along with Scandinavia. The Germanic speakers—Saxons, Angles and Jutes—who settled in Britain did come from what is now the state of Schleswig-Holstein in the North of Germany, which abuts Denmark. And of course there was a significant overlay of Danish onto Old English as well.

West		North
Old Frisian	herte/hirte	Old Icelandic	hjarta
Dutch	hart	Swedish	hjärta
Old Saxon	herta	Danish	hjerte
Old High German	herza	Old English	heorte
German	herz	Mid. English	hert
		English	heart

With the Norman Invasion English picked up the Latin derived words for heart as well, as can be seen in words such as accord, cordial, courage, credible, credit, creed, grant, miscreant, and quarry (i.e. prey).

What comparative linguistics does is to look at all the forms and look for logical transformations that might account for all the forms. Such changes much be checked against a range of words with the same sounds. It's only when patterns emerge across a wide range of words that one can describe regular changes (what we might once have called formulating laws). The more obvious examples help to explain the less obvious.

*kred vs *kerd

I recently read that treating kred and kerd as the same root might be incorrect.

Outside of the verbal system we find another word that curiously seems to display such a gradation and that is *ḱerd- 'heart', while in Sanskrit we find hṛd- and in Avestan we find zərəd- which both seem to go back to *ǵʰrd-, and then there's the Sanskrit śrad- (notice the schwebe ablaut!) which in combination with dhā- 'to give' give a lovely indo-european expression also found in Latin Credere 'to believe'. This form seems to go back to *ḱred-.

A schwebe ablaut is a full-grade vowel that is not always in the same position within the root. We don't really talk about vowel grades in English though we use them, e.g. in the verb sing sung sang and the related noun song the changed vowel gives us grammatical information. Ablaut is a very important part of Sanskrit morphology, for example those derived from √dṛś exhibit the various vowel strengths: dṛṣti, darśana, draṣṭṛ, adrākṣit. But note that darśana and draṣṭṛ invert the order of the vowels in the stronger grades (what the Sanskrit grammarians called guṇa and vṛddhi). Modern grammarians make guṇa the normal grade and talk about a weaker (ṛ) and a stronger (ār/rā) grade. So in √dṛś the vowel grades from weakest to strongest are: ṛ, ar/ra, and ār/rā. With ṛ one sees that strengthening in Sanskrit is like adding ă (short a) before the root vowel and applying the rules of sandhi. With other vowels the changes are a bit less obvious.

Another example is √bhū'to be'. The vowel grades for ū are: ū, o, & au, where o ≈ ă+u; and au ≈ ā+u. [note au is a diphthong]. √bhū forms a present stem by strengthening the root and adding a.

root: bhū
guṇa: bh[ăū] (= bho)
+ a: bhă-ūa (which sandhi resolves to) bhava-
conjugations: bhavāmi, bhavasi, bhavati etc.

In the past particle, the root stays in the weaker grade so: bhūta. And in the strongest grade we find the noun bhauta'related to living beings'. These processes were first described by Pāṇini in perhaps the 4th century BCE. Through study of Sanskrit grammar the principles were rediscovered by the first European comparative linguists. The term ablaut (German 'off sound') for this phenomenon was coined by Jacob Grimm of "the Brothers Grimm" in the late 19th century.

Edward Sapir notes a difference in the Tocharian word for heart:

The Tocharian word [käryā] does not represent IE *ḱṛd-yā́ (i.e. *ḱ_erd-yā́) but *ḱr_ed-yā́ (reduced from the basic *ḱred- seen in Sanskrit śrad and Latin crēdō< * kred^e-dō).

Selected Writings of Edward Sapir. University of California Press, 1968 p.227

So Sapir is also distinguishing *kred and *kṛd (> kerd). Jonathan Slocum's PIE Etyma List records two roots: kered- and kred-, but they both mean heart and the list of cognates or reflexes does not distinguish between them.

Sanskrit roots with initial /h/ are very often degraded from /dh/ or /gh/. Sometimes this becomes obvious. For example in the root √han 'to strike' The present tense 3rd person singular is hanti, but the 3rd person plural is ghnanti. Similarly we find the perfect jaghāna, a past participle ghāta (also hata). (cf my comments on the word saṅgha). So we can deduce from this that √han must originally be from *√ghan. In other roots the archaic forms don't survive. So on face value the idea that hṛd might represent an archaic *ǵʰrd- is not outrageous. However I can't find a root *ǵʰrd- in any PIE etyma list I have access to. Nor does any root that I can find seem to fit the bill.

Words related to either hṛd or śrad are few and far between in Sanskrit. If hṛd were a separate root we might expect a word hrada, and we do find such a word, but it means "a deep pool" and it seems to be connected to the root √hlād or√hlad 'refresh', which has only sporadic use. In India there is a regular confusion of l and r. In fact on the Asoka pillars the word for king is lāja not rāja. Both words have a specific domain beyond which they have little use: hṛd, hṛdaya 'heart'; hṛdya 'in or of the heart; charming etc'. Versus śraddhā 'faith', śrāddha 'faithful, funeral rite'. We do see some variants on √dhā used with śrad: śrad-dadhāna, śrad-dhayita, śrad-dhita, śrad-dheya but the sense stays the same.

Conclusions

Sound changes cannot happen at random. And yet the change from /k/ to /s/ is counter intuitive. It is logical however. The steps to get the other sounds look like this (as best I can tell):

/k̑/ > /k/ involves a moving the tongue back slightly in the mouth. Allowing some air past the tongue gives /k^h/ and dropping the stop altogether leaves us with /h/. The same change starting from /k̑/ > /k̑^h/ > /ś/. Voicing /ś/ gives /z/ and moving the tongue a little forward and dropping the aspiration gives /s/.

We've already seen how ar can alternate with ra with no change in sense. And lastly we have to allow for a vowel to interpose between two consonants. Describing all the vowel changes would extend this essay too much, but one can work through the logic of that as well. We've now described how one root with a weakest grade *kṛd and strong grades kred or kerd, could produce all the many variants by the application of simple rules that are anchored in how the tongue moves in the mouth to produce vocal sounds. With this particular word the sense of it has remained remarkably stable - all the different languages understand this word to mean "heart".

So can we now say any more about Sanskrit hṛd/śrad? Looking at the IE cognates it seems that only Sanskrit exhibits this alternation of ar and ra. So my suspicion is that Sanskrit has retained this feature of PIE rather more prominently than other languages. Since getting from /h/ to /ś/ is a complex process I conclude that it is less likely than the other option: that either hṛd or śrad is a loan word from another branch of the Indo-European family. Since the expected change is /k̑/ > /ś/ and the Avestan has /z/ it looks like hṛd is a loan word from a closely related language that favoured the change /k̑/ > /h/. This doesn't eliminate the possibility that hṛd comes from a root *ǵʰrd-, just that with the resources at my disposal I cannot find such a root. Since the sense of the word changes so little across time and space, however, it seems less likely that there were two roots.

The point here is not to draw strong conclusions, but to think about how language sounds change over time, and how that change tends to be systematic: e.g. all initial /k̑/ change to /ś/. It is interesting that some of the main distinctions between say Vedic and Avestan, or between Vedic and Pāḷi are just these systemic changes in pronunciation.

~~oOo~~

Endosymbiosis according
to Lynn Margulis.

There have been some watershed events in the history of evolution theory. The discovery of fossils. Darwin and Wallace's insights into natural selection. The discovery of the structure and function of DNA by Crick, Watson, Franklin and Wilkins. To this list I would add the discovery of endosymbiosis. Unfortunately there hasn't yet been a defining moment in the study of epigenetics, but it ought to be represented too. We're still waiting for a decisive breakthrough in biogenesis - how life got started in the first place, but it will also be a watershed when it comes.

It's Endosymbiosis I want focus on in this essay. Endo means 'internal' and symbiosis means 'living together' and the compound refers to the fact that each of our cells is in fact a community of bacterial cells living together. This idea was first floated in the early 20th Century by a Russian scientist, Konstantin Mereschkowski. His observation concerned the green parts of plants. Seen under a microscope the plant resolves into uncoloured structures which support small green pills called Chloroplasts. These are very similar to cyanobacteria or blue-green algae and he conjectured that their might be a relationship. In the 1920s another scientist named Ivan Wallin made a similar identification between mitochondria (the oxygen processing parts of our cells) and other kinds of free living bacteria.

However the watershed event for endosymbiosis was the publication, after considerable difficulty with the establishment journals, of this paper:

Sagan, Lynn. (1967) 'On the origin of mitosing cells.'Journal of Theoretical Biology. 14(3) March: 225–274, IN1–IN6. DOI: 10.1016/0022-5193(67)90079-3

This rightly famous paper is now copied online in many places. Lynn Margulis had married Carl Sagan young and subsequently reverted to her maiden name for most of her career. So we'll call her Margulis, even though she was Sagan at the time. Incidentally Margulis was a collaborator with James Lovelock and a major contributor to the Gaia Hypothesis.

Margulis's mature theory goes like this. The first cells were bacterial. They had no nucleus, DNA in loops that could be shared with any other bacteria, reproduced by simple division, and no internal organelles with membranes. Bacteria are able to live in colonies with loosely symbiotic relationships, some are multicellular through their life cycle, but at some point one bacteria engulfed another, or one invaded the cell of another, and the result was not digestion or infection but symbiosis: a mutually beneficial relationship with one bacteria living inside another. Margulis argues that the complex cells of all plants and animals (called eukaryote) are the result of at least three symbiosis events in the past, with the photosynthesising chloroplasts of plants being a fourth. The resulting eukaryote cells are large, have a nucleus and other internally bounded organelles (particularly mitochondria) and reproduce sexually (they divide their DNA and allow it to recombine with half the DNA of another individual to produce variety). Eukaryote cells don't just form colonies, but collectively form multicellular organisms with a high degree of morphological specialisation.

The paper by Margulis led to the theory of endosymbiosis finding a firm footing and eventually to the idea being included in biology textbooks. However the establishment was and to some extent still are reluctant to follow up the implications of this discovery. NeoDarwinians treat Endosymbiosis as a one-off event 3 or 4 billion years ago with little relevant to evolution in the present.

But consider this. Every sperm is very like two kinds of organism. On one hand they are like certain type of motile bacteria with a single flagellum (a rotating 'tail') that propels them through the liquid environment. On the other hand a sperm is rather like a virus, which Margulis conceived of as a bacteria from which almost all the biological functionality had been stripped out: a virus is nuclear material with a basic mechanism to inject it into the host cell. A sperm travels to its target like a motile bacteria. When it meets an ovum it bonds with the outer surface and injects its DNA into the egg, like a virus. That DNA is transported to the nucleus to form a complete set of chromosomes and the cell is "fertilised". It begins to grow and divide almost immediately. Sperm are also unusual in that production of them requires lower temperatures than any other cell type - we males have to maintain a separate cooler environment for sperm production. So part of the complex human life-cycle is lived as a cross between a motile bacteria and a virus which prefers cooler temperatures. Each fertilisation event is an example of Endosymbiosis. If we don't have endosymbiosis at the forefront of our minds, we cannot understand the basics of reproduction.

Endosymbiosis is the most significant event in the history of evolution since life began. It ought to inform one of the fundamental metaphors for how we understand our universe, but instead we have competition, selfishness and treat the predator as totem. I hate to say this, but it all sounds a bit masculine, don't you think? We we might just have easily focussed on the combinative, symbiotic, collective aspects of life. So why don't we?

Evolution and Empire.

Margulis speculated in interviews that the reason her idea was so difficult to get published and the establishment was so reluctant to take it seriously, was to do with Victorian attitudes amongst the mainstream (mainly male) proponents of evolutionary theory. The maxim of evolution is "survival of the fittest", coined by Herbert Spencer and adopted by Darwin in later editions of On the Origin of Species. By this Darwin apparently meant "the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life" (Darwin Correspondence Project). In this section I want to look at the historical context for this maxim.

Britain and various European powers had fought repeated wars over many centuries, but with the opening up of Asia and the Americas, trade was making Europe seriously wealthy at the expense of their colonies. The British, perhaps more so even than their European neighbours, developed a sense of superiority. The decisive battles involved in defeating Napoleon at the beginning of the 19th century left Britain in almost total control of the world's sea lanes and trade routes. This cemented a victory in the long running trade wars between expanding European Empires and accelerated the growth of wealth in the UK. Investment money poured into technological innovations that turned the industrial tinkering into the the Industrial Revolution. The great symbol of the British Empire is found in Trafalgar Square in London. There Admiral Nelson is celebrated by a very ostentatious, and very costly monument: a statue set on a towering column supported by four enormous bronze lions. Less obvious are the aisles of St Paul's Cathedral which are lined with statues of military heroes rather than saints, something that shocked me when I first arrived in this country but now makes perfect sense: church, mercantile sector, state and military are all aligned here.

Darwin, Spenser and a previous generation of thinkers such as Jeremy Bentham (father of utilitarianism) and Adam Smith (humans primary motivation is self-interest) were writing at a time when Britain was the world's only super-power and it was busily using that advantage to exploit the entire world for individual profit. Even the peasants of England were exploited. The newly rich forced the enclosure of common lands for example, in order to both become more wealthy, but also to keep pressure on peasants to stop them revolting. Britain was, and to a great extent still is, a deeply hierarchical society dominated by a few wealthy and powerful families. Everyone is expected to play the social role they were born into, though anyone can aspire to be middle class these days because that threatens no one (except some of the middle class).

Back in the 19th Century Charles Dickens chronicled this way of life and the baleful influence it had on the less fortunate. Another contemporary, Karl Marx, saw the system for what it was and wanted to completely replace it. What has changed since Dickens and Marx is the rise of the middle class: a class of people whose main function is to manage and facilitate the wealth making activities of the wealthy. They do so in exchange for lives of relative comfort and security (compared to the poor) but seldom make enough money to escape the need to work for a salary for the best part of their adult lives. Averages salaries are about 1% of the earnings of their company's CEO and a tiny fraction of the actual profits of the company. Religion is still the opium of the people, but the middle classes oversee the production of the empty calories and mindless entertainment that are the crack cocaine of the people.

Thus for members of the landed gentry, such as Spenser and Darwin, it was only natural that they subscribed to the theory that nature favoured some members of a species above others. Some were destined to succeed and dominate the herd. It was at heart a notion that justified their position both in British society and the dominance of the British internationally. They and their whole class saw themselves as the fittest to rule. This attitude persists in Britain and is on open display in today's government. The members of government have hereditary privilege and wealth and often title as well. They see themselves as the natural leaders and arbiters of morality. In other words there is a political dimension to Darwin's ideas. We cannot understand the development of mainstream science of evolution without understanding this political dimension.

A key NeoDarwinian figure like Richard Dawkins is very much a product of the British class system: born to a Civil Servant father who administered a colony (Kenya); educated in a private school, followed by Balliol College, Oxford University; eventually becoming a "Don" at Oxford. There's no doubt that the boy was bright, but he was a member of a privileged class and as such had opportunities no ordinary British person would have, even now. And the vision of his class is basically the Victorian one. The Selfish Gene is essentially the Victorian gentleman's values expressed as an ideological view of genetics. Dawkins repeated says that the Selfish Gene is only a metaphor, but it is a metaphor for, even an apology for, the values of the British upper-classes as much as it is a metaphor for evolution. We can see that being enacted even today in the policies of conservative governments. Dawkins basically recapitulates Adam Smith's idea that each individual striving for their own benefit is the best way to benefit society. He even argues that this is the best way to understand altruism!

Compare Adam Smith

"Every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it ... He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for society that it was no part of his intention. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good." An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 1776

With Richard Dawkins:

"The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes. Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities in our genes. I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness. This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behavior. However, as we shall see, there are special circumstances in which a gene can achieve its own selfish goals best by fostering a limited form of altruism at the level of individual animals. 'Special' and 'limited' are important words in the last sentence. Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts that simply do not make evolutionary sense. " The Selfish Gene. 1976.

Coming in the late 1970s the conception of The Selfish Gene coincides with the rise of the new political and economic ideologies of the Right: the new libertarianism, that deprecates government's role in society and says it's every man for himself. Neolibertarians distrust government and believe an abstraction called "the market" can mediate and arbitrate the price of everything (including political and white-collar corruption). This is erroneously called Neoliberalism, but there is nothing liberal about it. Three years later Margaret Thatcher was elected as Prime Minister of the UK and began transforming society with this same metaphor in mind. Stripping away anything which put the breaks on the profit making activities of business people or the need for them to contribute to society beyond paying the lowest possible wages to their staff. Her successors, including the New Labour Party, have gone much further: NLP removed credit controls allowing the largest amount of private debt in recorded history to build up (topping 500% of GDP in the UK ca. 2008) so that when bust inevitably followed boom, it was arguably the worst in recorded history. The present government are slowly dismantling the welfare state by selling off provision of services to the private sector where they themselves are major investors (in any sane society this would count as corruption). Meanwhile vast amounts of taxes go unpaid, and the wealthy are helped with the process of insulating themselves from social responsibility by shoddy laws enacted by their peers in government and corrupt administrators.

Dawkins and Darwin must be seen in their political landscape. Must be seen as active participants in both shaping and justifying the ideology of the ruling classes, at least in Britain. Seeing things clearly is part of waking up.

Each year we discover more and more about the role of symbiosis in speciation, in the effective working of our gut, in evolution generally. And not just symbiosis, but cooperation more generally, and related events like hybridisation. All of these make a mockery of the Selfish Gene metaphor because everywhere we look things only work at all when they work together. Where Dawkins saw altruism as rare, it is in fact ubiquitous. Where Dawkins saw genes only working for the benefit of similar genes, in symbiogensis and symbiosis completely unrelated genes benefit each other. Genes are in fact very generous.

In fact there's no level of organisation in which the part can function independently from the whole. A gene requires a genome; a genome requires a population; a population requires an ecosystem. The dependency is not mere abstraction, it's an absolute. For example, the cell is a product of its genome as a whole (including epigenetic factors) and without the cell the gene can neither survive nor function. This is not to say that there is no competition or no examples of self-interested behaviour. But it is to question the pivotal role given to metaphors involving selfish individuals pursuing self-interested goals benefiting the whole, especially when generally speaking. It is to question what is a self in the first place. When what we think of as a "self" is in fact a community, what does selfish even mean?

The Values of Modernist Buddhism

The self-justificatory Victorian metaphor runs very deep in British society. And is generally quite popular at the moment, because the USA is inventing stories to justify its position in the world: the self-declared champion of freedom. The idea that the vision of nature put forward by ideological zealots, steeped in the politics of Libertarianism, is the only possible view is beyond a joke. It's a tragedy. At present it is being used to justify exploiting working people throughout the first world to pay off debts incurred by corrupt bankers and their political facilitators. The effect in the developing world is often akin to slavery. The every-man-for-himself and no-holds-barred approach was supposed to allow wealth to accumulate across the society, through "trickle down economics", but in fact it just meant that the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. Wealth is being funnelled up to the wealthy. This happens because given free reign, greed forces wage-earners to work longer for less money. Neolibertarians only see staff as an expense that sucks money out of the pockets of shareholders: a line item to be minimised. People don't matter to them.

More than any other area of science I know of, the science of evolution reflects politics and in particular the political values of the Right. As George Lakoff has wryly observed, the Right have not only been setting the political agenda for the last 4 or 5 decades, they have been cunningly using language to frame and control the political discourse for everyone. I fear we may be seeing an end to the liberal experiment, to the spirit of liberté, égalité, and fraternité.

This critique, if you believe it, has much wider implications. The idea of creating a world that might be consistent with Buddhist values is at present losing ground. Survival of the fittest, as envisaged by the wealthy elite, is driving us backwards. A survey of Buddhist countries offers no great insights and no models for emulation (unless we fancy the brainwashed peasantry of Bhutan). While I do not agree that Modern Buddhists are necessarily complicit in and facilitating this situation (Slavoj Žižek strikes me as a fatuous pseudo-intellectual), I am not seeing the clarity of economic and political thinking from Buddhist leaders that might make a difference. Because of this deficit I see Buddhists engaged in activities, which, while in themselves are admirable enough, are entirely ineffectual and insufficient to make a significant difference to the status quo. We continue to reach 100s of people each year in countries with populations of 10s or 100s of millions. Of those 100s the vast majority are middle-aged and middle class and none at all are of the ruling classes. Indeed as Westerners have begun to take Buddhism more seriously, the Western world has taken substantial steps away from our values because legislators and businessmen are now one and the same. That was the revolution. It was not televised. The rule of the business people, for the business people, by the business people. The only Buddhists challenging this at present are those taking mindfulness into the corporate and political arenas and they seem to get nothing but flack from other Buddhists.

At present our Buddhist leaders tend to be introspective and politically naive meditation teachers. Our organisations are headed by introverts who fail to be outward looking enough to properly engage in politics let alone effective organisational communication. We have great difficulty managing the politics of our own organisations, let alone getting engaged with the world in a united way.

Modern Buddhists generally have a tendency to disengage from worldly events and distance themselves from politics. We still draw heavily on the baby-boomer counter-culture ethos that sat back and let the Neolibertarians take over. In this we are quite unlike our monastic antecedents. Buddhist monks were sometimes so wealthy and so heavily involved in politics that they virtually ran empires. Sometimes the conflict between monks and bureaucrats spilled over into open war, in which the monks usually lost out. Obviously some kind of middle-way would be preferable.

We Buddhists need to get up to speed with economic and political critiques and to get involved in public discourse. We need to understand the metaphors that underpin modern life, where they originate, how pervasive they are, and develop strategies to effectively counter them where necessary. At present all the major political parties have bought into Neolibertarian ideology to some extent and it is inimical to our values. Dropping out of the system does not change the system. It merely allows the system to change in ways beyond our influence. This is the lesson of the baby-boomer counter-culture approach.

It won't be easy. Most of us are middle-class and middle-aged already (80% of the Triratna Order are over 40 and I gather this is not unusual in Buddhist Groups). We're used to being able to do pretty much what we want in exchange for our functionary roles in the economy. We don't expect to lose our freedom of religion or our comfortable way of life. Or we're comfortable with dropped-out obscurity. We do worry about being able to sustain that comfort after we stop working. And since we live longer, our retirement lasts longer and decrepitude progresses much further before we die, meaning we have to put more effort into ensuring that comfort. We're hardly revolutionaries, though many of us like to think we are. With all due respect to my teachers, the counter-culture thing was never revolutionary because it hardly changed anything and in contrast to the rise of Neolibertarianism that happened at the same time, it was negligible. Contrast this with the aggressive engagement and success of the suffrage movement and its successors (though I sometimes blanch under the scorn of feminists, I support equal rights). There are models for changing the social landscape, and to-date we are too proud to follow any of them.

I'm not a Buddhist leader, nor do I have the ear of any Buddhist leaders. I know one or two influential people read this blog, but I'm not getting open endorsements or anything. The best I can hope for is to be an irritant. One of my intellectual mentors once asked "Of what use to me is a friend who is not a constant source of irritation?" (Richard P Hayes. Land of No Buddha, p.179). I've tended to paraphrase his conclusion as "a friend ought to be a constant source of irritation; but not a source of constant irritation." I hope to be a friend to Buddhists everywhere.

~~oOo~~

It so happens that George Lakoff recently updated his book on political metaphors and framing political debates: Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. Due in shops mid September 2014. Worth a read if this kind of thing floats your boat.

Garden of Eden
Hieronymus Bosch

Recently I copped some abuse on Twitter because I disagreed with a tweet that, basically, argued that everyone is entitled to security no matter how risky their behaviour. Possibly what I'm about to write will earn me more disapprobation. This does worry me. Like most writers I crave approval. However it's an interesting area of ethics. Do we have a right to safety which is distinct from our duty to care for ourselves?

We live in a non-utopian universe. There are risks. I live in the beautiful and largely tranquil, City of Cambridge. On the whole the streets are safe, even at night. But I make a point of not going to certain places at night because there is a risk attached. There are some places I know where people have been attacked, where drug addicts congregate, or where I feel fear. I've never been physically attacked in Cambridge. I'm careful not to put myself in a situation where I might be, because when I was growing up I was repeatedly assaulted by other kids in my neighbourhood and I'd like to avoid a repeat.

I'm not arguing that this is ideal or even OK. I don't like to feel afraid. I'd prefer to live in a world where people were all friendly (much more friendly than the average Cantabridgian!) but I don't. You don't. We don't. Most people reading this won't be living in a war zone, but there are people nearby who would rob us or hurt us for a variety of reasons. Even if we are actively trying to change this, it's a fact.

We live in a non-utopian universe. I envisage "utopian" here as a kind of analogue of Euclidean. Euclidean geometry is a special case of geometry that assumes a flat world. On a small enough scale the world approximates flatness so that Euclid's geometry is useful in the way that Newton's mechanics are useful. If you want to build a house, Euclid will do. If you want to circumnavigate the world in a yacht it won't do, you need spherical geometry (at least, though the earth is slightly oblate). There's a logic to Euclidean geometry and it works within artificially constrained frameworks, but it breaks down in any kind of bent universe. The real universe is non-utopian, in the way that real-world geometry is non-Euclidean. We can imagine a perfect world, even do geometry in it, but that does not make it real.

All actions have consequences. This is hardly rocket science. But it is something to keep in mind. In a non-utopian world actions also have risks attached. Some consequences are desirable and some not. For any given action there'll known consequences and unknown consequences; and each consequence will have a probability of occurring with respect to the action. In life we gamble on both good and bad consequences. Sometimes we play safe, sometimes we take risks. Sometimes risks pay off, sometimes not. Research suggests we're poor at gauging probabilities of outcomes, but even so it's still up to us to make the call. We decide.

There are two main issues: the risk and the risky behaviour. If I argue against the latter, it does not mean I endorse or enforce the former. It is terrible that everyone is at risk of being robbed or assaulted. But we live in a non-utopian universe. There's never been a time or place where anyone has lived without unfair risks. No one is, or has ever been, completely safe. If one can take reasonable precautions against the risk of assault that is realistic. It's not necessarily a capitulation to the criminal element.

I've been assaulted many times, to the point where I have permanent psychological scars (and a badly healed broken arm). Not all the people who assaulted me years ago were male. A number of females joined in or initiated violence against me. But yes, on the whole men are more physically violent than women. The risk of being assaulted by a man are much higher. But the risk of being assaulted by any given man? I don't have statistics, but I've known very few men in my life who assaulted anyone, even counting a childhood full of violence. It was always a select few who were physically violent and everyone, men included, feared them. So I think we need to be cautious about assigning blame for the situation. Just blaming "men" for example, as many people do, doesn't help. All people are products of their upbringing to some extent. The fact of violence in society is complex.

I had a number of insights on my ordination retreat in 2005. Often on sleepless nights I would walk up the valley to look at and talk to the stars. It was up there, late one night, that I let go all remaining hostility to the people who assaulted me in my childhood. My tormentors were the products of poverty, alcoholism, colonialism and racism and so on. I realised that I knew the fear and anger they experienced. I also knew that they were like that because they too were surrounded by frightened angry people. Being a target for their violence I never had any sense that I was privileged with respect to them, the main difference was that I was loved and cared for (though assaulted by members of my family at times also). We too were poor and working class; living in a rough neighbourhood of a small town with low educational standards; and we had low expectations of life. It was my mother who pulled us out of that milieu, inspired us to be educated and pursue our dreams. She came from a hellish background of abandonment and violent alcoholic adults, so where she got her aspirations I don't know. I think perhaps from the Church. In which case I'm grateful to the Church. I published the story of her early life if anyone is interested.

Today it makes me reflect on the risk of being assaulted. People are usually violent for a reason. They're usually the victims of violence, often from an early age. The fact that some people in my current city are violent is not because of sexism or testosterone or any of the glib arguments put forward by the kind of entitled modern feminists that I met on Twitter. A non-utopian society creates these people, fosters them, and fails to offer them alternatives. Whether it's too much effort, or too expensive, or we're ideologically opposed to helping people that won't help themselves, or whatever it is. Society has an underbelly because of the way that society operates. And we all participate in society. We all make it what it is.

The Utopian Universe.

The utopian universe is supposed to be moral, it ought to take care of injustice and imbalances of various kinds and automatically set things to right. In some ways Karma is the ultimate expression of this utopian ideal: it describes a cosmic balance unmediated by any agent human or supernatural. In the utopian universe, morality is or ought to be a zero-sum game. When Anubis weighs the heart of the dead against the feather of the law, that heart is either heavy or light and what happens subsequently is determined by which way the balance swings.

In the olden days the olden people had agreements with the olden Gods. There was a quid pro quo. They offered sacrifice (we gave up something valuable) or got out-of-their-skulls on magic mushrooms or whatever and all agreed to follow God's rules (whatever they were imagined to be) and in return God would keep the seasons regular, send enough rain but not too much, keep us and our cattle free of disease, protect us from enemies (more on enemies in a minute), and generally give us our Daily Bread. Except God was a lousy provider. We got climate change; floods and droughts; we and our animals got sick; our enemies persistently attacked us; and everyone died sooner rather than later, often horrifically. God doesn't keep Her side of the bargain. When there were no scientists the failure of a bargain with God was not cause to reconsider the bargain. "It's not you, it's me," they'd say. "I did agree to follow the rules all of the time in the full knowledge that no-one follows all of the rules all of the time. Clearly if there is fault it is mine, and punishment is only just. Ebola virus? Well OK, it seems kinda harsh, but God must know what She's doing. 50% infant mortality? God must really love babies!"

In a utopian universe the harsh and unfair must balanced by the beautiful and fair. Rather than give up the belief we became schizoid. We split the World into two. Now & later. Here & there. Here, things are manifestly unfair. Most of the universe is inhospitable to life, and even the good parts are full of parasites and pathogens (the better the weather the worse the flies). Bad people prosper and good people flounder. But all moral debts are paid in the afterlife. It's there we find beauty and justice.

The generalised archaic utopian religion lives on, but instead of buying it for a price, we demand it as a right. This sense of entitlement is a new game for humans. We have Rights, God damn it. We demand that we have Rights. And we also demand that we have these rights independently of whatever else we might do or not do. The Tweet I disagreed with was a demand for the right to security regardless of risky behaviour. It was a demand for the "authorities" to institute the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth, but with no obedience or hegemony, no allegiance or quid pro quo.

"Rights" is also a capricious bulwark against the non-utopian universe. Like God, Rights tends to get distracted and allow terrible things to happen. The Rights of the rich and powerful tend to get more notice than the rights of the poor and oppressed. I may have a Right to live without fear of being robbed or have my arm broken, but that doesn't stop me being robbed and it certainly didn't stop me having my arm broken as a kid.

Oh, Rights is a good thing in many ways. The UN declaration of Human Rights is enlightened in many ways. The values it expresses are admirable, they are my values. The actions taken on many fronts towards treating everyone with respect and ensuring they have food and shelter put God to shame, as She never did so much in all the Millennia of being worshipped. When we take pride in ourselves and take care of ourselves we do much better than God ever did.

But the facts are these: we do not control the weather; we are still prone to disease; human enemies of various kinds still exist. Demanding our rights does not change this. Human enemies might include angry people; hungry people; people with compromised empathy; greedy people; powerful people (or some combination of all and more). Of course we can imagine a world in which no one wants to rob or assault us. The more so if we have been robbed and assaulted. But as the olden saying goes: "If wishes were horses, beggars would ride". Whereas in fact "beggars can't be choosers".

We live in a non-utopian universe. Some people find ways to shut out this fact. And they tell you that shutting it out in their particular way is a panacea. All the ills of the world don't even seem like ills if we adopt the position that ills are just a matter of perception. Or the ills of this world are cancelled out by infinite bliss on the other side. But there is no panacea. The things we think will cure all ills are thousands of years old and they have not yet cured all ills.

After 100,000 years of religion most people are still unhappy most of the time (even the one's with digital watches). Indeed if people weren't unhappy, Buddhism would have almost no customers. Ergo? Ergo, religion (Buddhism) is not the way to institute Utopia. No way of thinking that accepts the definite possibility of a utopian universe ought to be taken seriously. The universe is not broken. It is what it is. It is non-utopian and independent of our values. Fixing the universe is not an option. In a non-utopian universe, morality is a non-zero sum game. There are winners and losers. Some of the winners are good by our values system and some are not. There are values, just no universal values. If we understand what the game of life is all about, maybe we can play it better? Except it's not really a game, now is it? Hunger is not abstract. Pain isn't just a concept.

The best I can do is take responsibility for my own actions. I'm not responsible for all men or the British Empire. I don't blame my family or my neighbourhood for my difficulties in life. There's no mileage in blaming anyone. I joined a Buddhist movement in part because as an individual I am weak and vulnerable. As a member of this collective I hope to make a difference in the world. I could have joined a political or ecological group, but, I joined a religious group. I've dedicated my life to participating as much as I can in the activities of this group and to helping them as best I can to making the world a better, safer, more harmonious place. But the universe is non-utopian. It's never going to be perfectly good, perfectly safe, or perfectly harmonious. Indeed, even a religious community is not always good, safe or harmonious.

~~oOo~~

The city of Cambridge is old. The University of Cambridge was founded in 1208, but the town dates from centuries earlier. We have the remains of a motte & bailey castle overlooking the town. It was built in 1068 just two years after the Norman conquest. But in fact there are Iron Age settlements in the neighbourhood that are around 3500 years old. This is around the time the earliest Indian texts were composed. Romans and Saxons also lived here at different times. Cambridge was under the Danelaw in the 9th century.

I grew up in New Zealand where human occupation is thought to have begun ca 1000 CE with the arrival of the first Pacific Islanders, probably from what are now known as the Cook Islands. European's began arriving some centuries later beginning with Abel Tasman from Zeeland, Holland (hence the name), and followed by James Cook from Britain. Most of the evidence of human occupation of New Zealand is only a century or two old. Down the road from me in Cambridge is a church built when the Māori were washing up on the shores of New Zealand.

In New Zealand we think 100 years is a long time. In Britain we live with much longer roots into the past. But we also have reminders of transiency. Some of the most evocative of these are the various cemeteries dotted around. In Britain each church parish had their own cemetery, though some, like the one I'm going to discuss, were shared between parishes. Many of these are now closed, full of the dead, and are slowly being turned into parks. Even headstones moulder given centuries. I particularly enjoy Mill Rd Cemetery. It's quite large and in a quiet part of town so that one can sit there and have a sense of being isolated from the busyness and business of the city. There are many mature trees and smaller trees, shrubs, brambles (if you will eat berries that grow in a cemetery they are juicy and ripe at this time of year).

grave markers of that time
are rather ostentatious

Mill Rd Cemetery was consecrated in 1848 and closed in 1949 and thus neatly spans the last century of the British Empire. By 1848 Britain was starting to become seriously wealthy on the back of the Empire, so many of the grave markers from that time are rather ostentatious by today's standards. And yet some stones are now so weathered that the names are unreadable. Acid-rain due to fumes from industry and motorised transport has ablated the sandstone headstones, though marble fairs better. A couple of events of savage vandalism damaged many gravestones. The cemetery is slowly giving way to nature. In fact the management of the cemetery are helping nature out by planting trees.

There are a number of paths through the cemetery. However, after some thought I realised that not all of them are official. Some of them are simply shortcuts that have been worn down by use. In fact in some cases the shortcuts go right over graves. When it rains all the paths flood. If there's a lot of rain people go around the puddles and walk new paths into the grass. Again these frequently go over and across graves with apparently no hesitation. These old graves are not as sacred as new graves, if they are sacred at all. I find this aspect of the cemetery troubling. But then after a few hundred years we treat graves as curiosities to dig up and examine. Where is that line in time?

Another aspect for contemplation is that the cemetery regularly attracts groups of homeless people and/or alcoholics. In dry weather it's a pleasant place to spend time. And often-times people sleep out under the bushes in out of the way places. At one point a regular colony became established. But this is Cambridge and such things are not tolerated here, so they were moved on. Watching these people, whose lives and health are wrecked by drugs, alcohol, or fate, is salutary. I dare not stare for fear of inviting confrontation, but I do think that I could so easily have ended up amongst them. I gave up alcohol more than 20 years ago, before it wrecked my life, but had I waited a little longer it might have done a great deal more damage than it did. Both my grandfathers and at least one of my great-grandfathers were alcoholics. One of my uncles died of an accidental morphine overdose, another was a junky who died from a stab wound to his cirrhotic liver that a healthy man would have survived. There are other addicts in the family. I'm not so different from the dishevelled and unwashed street-people drinking their cheap, ultra-strong beer for breakfast. Having shouted conversations, not comprehending or caring.

Descendants have
forgotten their ancestors.

But what really strikes me about the graves in Mill Rd Cemetery is that except for one or two, none are tended, kept clear of weeds or offered flowers. Descendants have forgotten their ancestors. And this in a town with more than averagely memorable people. Even holding relatively high office in the town is no guarantee of being remembered. Two or three generations after we die we'll, most of us, be forgotten. We think all the stuff we're doing today is so important. But most of it leaves no lasting impact on the universe. Even if we do manage to pass on our genes, our families forget us. We cease to exist even in memory. History has a very bad memory. Most of what we think of as important today is entirely inconsequential in the long view. All those decisions we agonise over for hours, days and months, they won't be given a moments thought in fifty years. Even if we have kids, our graves will go untended. Our cemetery will eventually be closed and turned into a park. Vandals or acid rain will destroy our modest headstones. People will casually walk over our graves to save a few minutes or avoid a rain-filled puddle.

So the question I find myself asking is this. "What will be my legacy?" OK I've written some books and they are in libraries. But they're printed on acid paper and won't last more than a century. And there were only ever a few dozen copies of each. Perhaps Google will leave this blog to stand for years after I die and stop updating it? Who knows? Maybe they'll start deleting cob-websites after a period of inactivity to save a little bit of money? In fifty years it's not going to matter much. Maybe my academic publications will have a longer life (if I ever get my Heart Sutra material published it might last a century).

Does it make sense to even think in terms of legacy in this light? And if not legacy, then on what standard do we assess the value of our lives. One can see how life after death holds it's appeal for the majority of people. Or should we adopt the YOLO "live in the moment" maxim? In its hedonistic or contemplative aspects. My experience suggests that moments are only bearable if we know they're going to end. One has to have a longer perspective than just one moment in order for any given moment to be tolerable. In the moment, one is utterly alone. In perspective one is intimately connected. If in the long term we don't make a difference or matter, then perhaps in the short term we matter to the extent we experience our connectivity? Being in a dynamic web of relations is fundamental to being human, perhaps it is the ultimate source of meaning also?

I don't have answers to these questions and I've become distrustful of people who have easy answers. It seems to me that perhaps contemplating such things is a value in itself without ever coming to an end point. If I ask myself these questions then at least I'm not stumbling blindly through my life with no sense what why I do anything. And one gets the sense that so many people are blind.

So I continue to visit the cemetery. I sit and enjoy the environment, read, drink ginger beer, watch the people, think about the dead, and wonder about my place in the universe. It's hardly the ancient cremation ground practice, but it seems much better than a church or temple as a place for contemplation (weather permitting).

~~oOo~~

Pics from Mill Rd, Cemetery.

I enjoy Fentimans and Fever Tree ginger beer. Ginger beer, especially these fairly dry varieties, is a great alternative to alcoholic drinks for those who still like the feel of a bottle in their hand. If more of us drink it, the shops & pubs will stock it. Give it a go.

In discussing Vitalism and science I mentioned the threshold between living and dead matter. I've already written at some length about the idea of life after death. I've argued that we need to consider Buddhist afterlife beliefs in the context of other afterlife beliefs and to see the structural similarities that make it very similar to other afterlife believes. I've also discussed the problem of transmitting information from one like to another and how pratītyasamutpāda was modified to try to preserve the Buddhist doctrine of karma.

In this essay I want to explore the threshold between death and life, and particularly in this direction, more closely. It seems to me that our perception cannot help but be biased on this subject because of the way we experience life and death. I also want to touch on the state of the field of abiogensis, the study of how living cells might have been created from a combination of non-living components. Of we still don't have all the answers to this question, but we haven't been looking for very long, just a few decades. For most of human history we believed that God, in one form or another, animated dead matter to make living things. Note that the issue of an interim state (antarabhāva) between death and life will be dealt with in a forthcoming essay.

The Quick and the Dead

Our usual perspective on the distinction between living and dead matter arises out of seeing living beings die. Often if we're with someone who dies and it's calm enough to make observations, we will see that they simply breathe out and never breath in - they expire. Perhaps this is why life is associated with the breath? With no more in-breath the functions of life swiftly stop. I will deal with the issue of the breath and vitalism in a separate essay.

We do not directly witness a "new life" starting in the sense of conception or embryos developing and until very recently did not even know about gendered gametes fusing for form a new zygote. Certainly most of us never see so-called "dead" matter turn into "living" matter since it happens out of sight. We eat food in the form of once living but now dead living things, but we don't see the process of how that "dead" matter is incorporated into our living bodies. We don't see iron being encapsulated in a haem and becoming haemoglobin and transporting oxygen around our bloodstream We might even understand that this does happen, but we never witness it.

Any explanation for life must not only account for large scale beings like humans, but also for microscopic life and even for single celled organisms. The amoeba is clearly a living thing. If matter can enter and leave a living organism continually without ever affecting the status of the organism vis-à-vis' living, then we can explain this in two ways.

On one hand we might say that as a cell absorbs, say, a molecule of oxygen that has been transported in the blood by haemoglobin, that individual molecule is endowed with jīva, becomes alive, and participates in the collective life of the being. But this sounds a little implausible since oxygen does the same chemistry outside living cells. If every molecule has it's own nano-jīva or some infinitesimal portion of a cosmic jīva then all matter is alive (to some extent). And if all matter is alive then the transition of a living being from alive to dead is just a matter of perspective, since the matter doesn't die when the person dies. The idea of a single life force, splinters into billions of trillions of tiny life forces that add up to a living being. The question is how we would distinguish jīva from ordinary physical energy. Here jīva and energy both do something similar, i.e. animate matter. The argument here is that individual molecules or even subatomic particles must have some animating force. Even so, since matter can appear dead we're still left wondering what is different between a handful of clay and a mouse. We haven't solved the problem of the distinction between life and death at all.

On the other hand we can see life as a property of the cell and see the matter, which comes and goes, as just a building block or a container for a singular jīva. This view is compatible with Vitalism and (more or less) Materialism. But it does mean there is no real distinction between living matter and dead matter; there's just matter and the distinction only applies to larger conglomerations of matter. For the vitalism something non-material (i.e. not made of matter) is added to the cell to make it live whereas to the materialist what is added is energy in various forms particularly heat and stored in chemical bonds.

Either way it seems that matter itself cannot be alive or dead. Matter is just matter. There's no such thing as living matter and dead matter. However there living organisms and dead organisms. So life is not a property of matter per se, but only of organisms. Though of course organisms are complex structures built of matter.

We used to imagine that something must enter the body at conception in order to make it living. But microscopy has showed that even before conception the zygote is a fully living thing. Sperm are produced as living things in a male's testes. Eggs are living in the ovaries of females from before birth. In the reproductive cycle there is never a time when a cell is produced dead and becomes alive. New living cells are formed from dividing old living cells. All of our cells are from lineages of cell division stretching back at least 3.5 billion years old. So if we never really go from being dead to being alive then what role could a jīva play?

The only time we really need a life force to explain anything is 3.5 billion years ago when the first living organisms came to life.

Abiogensis

Our perspective on the threshold between life and death is almost exclusively focused on the transition from life to death because the transition the other way is invisible to us in every day life. However scientists have been able to "see" into this domain in new ways in the last century so - the field is called abiogensis meaning "originating from the non-living".

image: Duke

The classic experiment that kicked off this field recreated our best guess of the physical and chemical conditions in the earth's atmosphere 3.5 billion years ago. The Miller-Urey Experiment (1953) created a closed system containing a mixture of gases made up of water, methane, ammonia and hydrogen. The gases were subjected to a continuous electrical spark intended to imitate lightening. The experiment ran for a week and at the end it was discovered that a rich variety of organic molecules had been spontaneously synthesised. The products included many molecules essential to life including amino-acids that make up proteins.

Many subsequent variations of this experiment have been conducted and showed that by fine tuning the conditions almost all the molecules required for life might have spontaneously occurred on early Earth. New theories about the conditions on early earth have provided new avenues of exploration. In addition, analysis of meteorites has shown that they frequently contain organic compounds as well and may have seeded some of the important molecules to the "primordial soup".

It's no longer beyond the scope of imagination for all of the required elements of life to have assembled spontaneously. Enclosed membranes made of lipids form under the right conditions; RNA molecules self-replicate and even noticeably evolve; amino acids occur in asteroids and meteors. It's only the last step that remains unknown. Just as quantum mechanics has broken down the barriers between physics and chemistry, the study of molecular biology is breaking down the distinction between chemistry and biology.

Life as a New Kind of Stability.

We've known for a long time that high energy systems are unstable and tend to find ways to shed energy and achieve greater stability. We understand this process as increasing the entropy in the system. Entropy can also be understood in terms of order: a highly ordered state has less entropy. With no external inputs systems tend to lower energy, less order, i.e. higher entropy states. So a drop of coloured dye in a container of water will diffuse until it is randomly distributed through out. A hot object will radiate heat until it matches the ambient temperature around it. If we add energy to a solid it will become a liquid then a gas (decreasing order) and vice versa.

Addy Pross, Professor of Chemistry at Ben-Gurion University, Israel, has suggested that living systems attain a new kind of stability that is different to the thermodynamic stability of minimal entropy states (Aeon Magazine). Over time the entropy of the universe increases. But living organisms bucks this trend. Living things at the molecular level is both high energy and highly ordered, indeed living things continually absorb energy rather than shedding it. In terms of thermodynamics living things ought to be unstable and short-lived. But living things are remarkably stable in thermodynamic terms. Pross calls this dynamic kinetic stability.

Pross argues that this dynamic kinetic stability is a feature of self-replicating molecular systems. For example, given the right conditions RNA molecules spontaneously self-replicate. But not always perfectly. All self-replicators will tend to exponential growth, but some variations replicate faster than others. The faster variants will come to dominate a system. A system of two RNA replicators which catalyse each other is even more stable.

Thus there seem to be two kinds of system stability: "one based on probabilities and energy, the other on exponentially driven self-replication." Mathematical of both kinds of system are relatively simple. Pross concludes:

"This distinction does not trace the dividing line between living and dead matter precisely – but it does explain it, and many of the other riddles of life into the bargain."

The approach is explored in more depth and the state of the field of systems chemistry is reviewed in Ruiz-Mirazo et al. (2014) - see below.

Conclusion

In trying to think about the distinction between life and death most of us are hampered by only having access to knowledge of the transition in one direction: living to dead. I would argue that even the conception process which involves the joining of two already living gamete-cells is rather abstract for most people. The bio-chemistry which describes the movement of matter into and out of living systems is opaque to non-scientists. Thus most of us are ill-equipped to understand the distinctions between living and dead organisms. Certainly many Vitalists still seek to frame the discussion in terms of living and dead matter despite this being anachronistic and inapplicable.

The science of abiogensis is far from providing a complete description of the systems that might have existed as precursors to living cells. The first serious attempts to recreate the conditions for living systems date only from the 1950s. It's easy to forget that it's only a few decades since such investigations began. It is relatively early days for this field and some significant progress has been made and there is no reason to believe that at some point a plausible set of starting conditions and pathways will not emerge. As Ruiz-Mirazo et al. conclude:

"Although chemistry operating on the prebiotic Earth must have been extraordinarily complex and heterogeneous, we believe it is not impossible to understand. A number of concepts and methodologies, developed over the past 30 years, are now mature enough to ensure a brilliant future for such an old and challenging endeavor of human beings: getting to know about their ancient origins from inert chemical matter."

The most important conclusion however is that there is no need to posit a life force which animates "dead matter". This aspect of Vitalism is entirely discredited.

~~oOo~~

See also

Attwater, James & Holliger, Philipp. 'A synthetic approach to abiogenesis.' Nature Methods 11, 495–498 (2014) doi:10.1038/nmeth.2893

Ruiz-Mirazo, Kepa; Briones, Carlos; and Escosura, Andrés de la. 'Prebiotic Systems Chemistry: New Perspectives for the Origins of Life.' Chemical Reviews.

Pross, Addy. 'Life’s restlessness.'Aeon Magazine.

This essays follows on from 'Vitalism: The Philosophy That Wouldn't Die.' (23 May 2014).
The next essay in this series will look at the concept of "spirituality".

The purpose of #meditation is to cultivate a mind that is a suitable instrument to discover the ultimate nature of reality. #buddhism— Culadasa (@Culadasa)
September 6, 2014 (Twitter)

~o~

We're still selling Buddhism in terms of absolutes. We're still telling people that if they want to discover "the ultimate nature of reality" then we can help them with that. I used to go along with this kind of hyperbolic rhetoric, but a few years ago I started asking what it meant and realised that not only did it not mean anything much, but that early Buddhist texts were replete with arguments against absolutes of this type. Indeed the idea of selling Buddhism as a way to discover the "ultimate nature of reality" is specifically parodied most obviously in the Tevijja Sutta (compare my paraphrase of part of the text).

The persistence of this way of talking about what we Buddhists do and what we seek is interesting. Anyone who wants to argue that Buddhism is not a religion needs to take a long look at this promise of absolute knowledge. It has a distinctively religious feeling to it. So what is the problem with this? I will draw on two sources for my critique: conversations with meditators who appear to have considerable experience of insight; and Buddhist texts.

Meditators.

We need to pay close attention to what deep practitioners say when discussing the effects of Buddhists practices. Those who have the most experience of putting Buddhism into practice are our best source of information on what it feels like to practice Buddhism. Serious meditators I know talk about the insights they gain in a fairly consistent way. And at the outset I would say that none of them talk about their experience in terms of discovering the nature of reality.

In meditation we observe our mind at work. In other words we observe experience. There seem to be several kinds of insight: insights into impermanence of experience generally; insights into impermanence of the experience of being a self; and insights that pertain to the apparent subject/object duality of experience.

I know many people on meditation retreats report periods where they lose their sense of self altogether. One sees a flower and has no sense: "I am seeing a flower." The experience of seeing the flower seems to be without a particular point of view or evaluation. There is just a flower and seeing. I've had glimpses of this kind of perception myself, so I trust the people that report it in far more depth. It's also widely described in other contexts - particularly by Jill Bolte Taylor describing her experience of having a stroke.

One of my teachers explained to me, from his own meditation experience, that the subject/object duality that characterises experience is not native to experience, but imposed on it. However, when we were talking about this recently I observed that this did not affect certain physical facts. Breaking down the subject/object duality for example did not affect his field of view: he could not see what I was seeing through my eyes, because his own eyes were facing in a different direction. I could see what was behind him and he could not. Thus even at this quite deep level of realisation there are still limitations on experience that insight does not erase. Physics, in effect, still applies. It's just that what comes in through the eyes is experienced in a radically different way because something in.

Thus it seems to me that even those who are gaining insights through meditation are not gaining insights into reality per se, not as we usually define reality anyway. They are not gaining insights into the nature of objects, or a world, independent of an observing mind; nor (even) are they gaining insight into the nature of the observing mind. They are not gaining insights into an underlying substrate upon which objects depend either. At least this is not what meditators talk about. The shift in perspective seems to produce insights into the nature of experience. This is exactly what we'd expect from studying early Buddhist texts, so let's look at them next.

Scholars & Texts.

There's a simple question it's important for Buddhists to ask.

Where does reality come in the skandhas?

Traditional narratives tell us the skandhas are everything. So is reality form? Is it sensation? Perception? Intention? Cognition? Is it in a combination of some or all of the skandhas? If reality is something we can gain insight into, if insight into reality is the goal we aim at, then we ought to be able to understand reality in terms of the skandhas. Or if not the skandhas then perhaps the āyatanas - the āyatanas are also said to be everything (Sabba Sutta). However I've yet to see any description of reality in terms of the skandhas. It's hard to see how the idea of reality, as we usually meet it, is compatible with the skandhas.

Reality is a word that implies something real. And as we know (or any of my readers ought to know by now) there are a number of critiques of the very notion of 'real'. I usually go back to the Kātyāyana Sūtra (which I've studied in Pāḷi, Sanskrit and Chinese versions). With respect to "the world" (loka), however we understand that word, reality (astitā) and unreality (nāstitā) don't apply. They don't apply because when we examine the world we see arising (samudaya) and cessation (nirodha). Reality is denied by cessation. Nothing that can go out of being can be considered real in this view. Unreality is denied by arising. Nothing can come into being if it is unreal. Even a cursory exploration of experience shows us experiences constantly arising and passing away. As Bhikkhu Bodhi says:

“The world with which the Buddha’s teaching is principally concerned is ‘the world of experience,’ and even the objective world is of interest only to the extent that it serves as that necessary external condition for experience.” (Bodhi 2000, The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: 394, n.182)

What about nibbāna? Isn't nibbāna associated with seeing reality? There are a number of "seeings" that are associated with nibbāna. And here seeing is a metaphor for knowing, since Indic languages have the same metaphor as we do in English: see what I mean? During his nibbāna the Buddha is said to have seen his own past lives and how they played out according to karma. And he saw the past lives of all beings doing the same. Lastly he saw the extinction of the āsavas in himself (i.e. the desire for sense pleasure, the desire for eternal being, wrong-views about experience and ignorance about the nature of experience).

The beginning of insight is labelled yathābhūta-jñānadarśana. Sometimes people take yathābhūta as consistent with reality. The word is etymologically a bit vague: bhūta is a past participle of 'to be'. I've tried to explore what it means, but taken in context there's no reason to suppose it means 'reality'. When we translated it as "things as they are" it's important to ask what is meant by "things". My first inclination these days is to answer "mental events". To talk about the "reality" of mental events is something we already know that early Buddhists thought was unhelpful. Reality and unreality don't apply.

One might also gain knowledge of vimukti - liberation from the three akusalamūla: raga, dosa and moha. Or knowledge of the destruction of the āsavas (kāma, bhāva, diṭṭhi, and avijjā). But we can hardly translate this into reality. The three unskilful roots or their opposites are hardly reality. They are mental events. As are the āsavas. So in these traditional accounts of nibbāna one is having insights into one's own mental events and processes. And in fact this is exactly the way that present day meditators describe their breakthroughs as well. There is a great deal of consistency between the two sources of information.

The criticism in the Tevijjā Sutta is extremely apposite here. In the text Brahmins are portrayed as teaching the way to the state of "companionship with God" (brahmasahāvyatā). But on questioning none of the Brahmins or their teachers had ever known this state for themselves. And the basic principle is that one cannot teach what one does not know. The Buddha stands them on their heads by saying the he does know, and Richard Gombrich (What the Buddha Thought) has read this as a sophisticated shift in levels referring to the brahmavihāra meditations. Cf. the Mettā Sutta. In other words the Buddha substitutes the Brahmanical goal of literally dwelling with God in heaven after death and the appropriate funeral rituals (including cremation), for the Buddhist meditations in which one suffuses the directions with positive emotions. A literal reading of brahmasahāvyatā would allow for no return in any case - like nibbāna it was a way off the wheel of birth and death (though note that Mahāyāna practitioners did not allow the Buddha to escape, but forced him to return as saviour, which constituted a major departure from early Buddhism). The Buddha was consistent in that he could teach something he knew, but he was being ironic in related brahmavihāra with brahmasahāvyatā - the two words are close synonyms but are used entirely differently in the two religious milieus.

I've never met a meditator who had personal knowledge of the ultimate nature of reality. Even those people with deep insight simply don't talk in those terms unless they slip into repeating dogma - its not the natural language of insight.

Conclusion

In order to make Culadasas's axiom consistent with early(ish) Buddhist philosophy we'd need to rephrase it along these lines:

The purpose of meditation is to cultivate a mind that is

a suitable instrument to discover the nature of experience.

Discovering the ultimate nature of reality is not the purpose of meditation, or at least it wasn't traditionally. It is not what meditation is good for in practice, in the sense that meditators don't report knowledge of the nature of reality. What's worse is that when Buddhists do start to talk about the nature of reality they very often have obviously naive views that are rooted in reading certain types of books, rather than being grounded in experience. Or they expound the nature of reality in one breath and then tell us that reality is ineffable in the next (which is simple confusion). There are more interesting discussions of how the doctrine of pratītyasamutpāda might describe reality, but it's been a few years since I found this kind of discussion compelling. The resultant reality is far too vaguely defined, ambiguous and poorly understood to be of much use to anyone. It's better to refrain from treating pratītyasamutpāda as a Theory of Everything and apply it in the domain of experience where it makes most sense.

Reality is not something that meditation is going to help with. Meditation is ways about exploring experience and/or cultivating experiences. So often the Buddha is supposed to have said: I teach suffering, the cause of suffering, the end of suffering, and the way to end suffering. That's it.

While I've explored the drift of Buddhist thought into the realms of ontology - of reality, what exists etc - in various essays now, I'm confident that, over the course of Buddhist thought, the methods and what they were capable of hardly changed at all (except for once when tantric practice emerged - but event that can be understood in terms of older paradigms with some thought). Of course Buddhist narratives did get caught up with ontological thinking and I expect that a closer examination would show that ideas about 'reality' emerged only once the concept of reality was admitted. This is certainly the drift of the changes wrought in response to the problem of Action at a Temporal Distance. And what happened was the doctrine decohered from practice for a time.

Probably the horrendous fudge of the Two Truths helped to bring the idea of a paramatha-dhātu or -loka into being. When you combine ontological thinking with notions of parama it's probably inevitable. It's one of the reasons I disparage the Two Truths doctrine - it facilitates wrong views. I don't think it had any significance in the first 1000 years of Buddhism, but of course that still leaves it with a long history.

What we look for in the long term is a strong coherence between Buddhist practice and doctrine; in fact we look for doctrine yoked to and driven by practice. When that is missing we are due for reform.

~~oOo~~

Is it possible that "mental illness" is an evolutionary adaptation to prevent us committing suicide when we feel like ending it all? It seems unlikely, but this is the subject of an article tweeted by @sarahdoingthing September 28, 2014.

C A Soper. "Anti-suicide mechanisms as a general evolutionary explanation for common mental disorders". University of Gloucester. [The article appears to be formatted for a publication, but no publication details are included. It's hosted at academia.edu where you can also find my academic work].

Since I have a long interest all three subjects (evolution, depression and suicide) I started to try to discuss the article on Twitter, but could not compress my thoughts into 140 characters. So this essay critically examines Soper's approach to evolution.

Soper argues that (1) "Common mental disorders are too common not to exist for a reason." and that (2) "On this evidence it is reasonable to deduce, as evolutionary psychologists do, that common psychiatric disorders must have their origins in natural selection" and that (3) "When two traits routinely occur together in this way, it is reasonable to infer that a single process is at work behind both, and a mechanism offered to explain one must be flawed if it cannot also explain the other." I want to look at these three underlying claims specifically and consider whether this is credible approach to evolutionary psychology and thus whether the conclusions drawn are valid.

Evolutionary Psychology

The field of evolutionary psychology is the approach of trying to find evolutionary explanations for (i.e. applying the idea of natural selection to) the ways our minds work. If our minds can be shown to work in a particular way, then we assume that this has some evolutionary advantage that has been selected for in the sense that people with this trait are more likely to survive and produce viable offspring. Evolutionary psychologists try to identify what that advantage is or speculate on what it might be. The second prong to this approach is to try to locate genes specifically associated with this function. This has produced the, usually spurious, media syndrome of reporting that "the gene for X has been found". Soper is not concerned with the second approach, only with trying to explain a puzzling phenomenon of the co-morbidity of some well-known problems.

On the whole I find evolutionary psychology a compelling hermeneutic. The idea that traits emerge and are preserved not just in our anatomy, but also in our neuro-anatomy and therefore in our brain function and behaviour, and that this anatomy is determined by our genome, all sounds quite reasonable. Amongst the more credible proponents of this theory include Robin Dunbar, Justin Barrett, and Robert McCauley. Dunbar has cogently argued that behaviours like laughter, singing and dancing helped to lower the time burden of maintaining social relationships (by enabling one to many relationships that replaced one to one grooming in ways not available to our ancestors or to present-day chimps) and made living in larger groups practical after our increased neocortex size made it possible. Larger groups have benefits in terms of protection from predators and thus help individuals in groups to survive. Justin Barrett has argued that our predilection for seeing agency in events makes us alert to being hunted and allows us to avoid becoming food for a predator, but as a side effect also primes us for believing in supernatural agency. And so on.

Soper's main sources for the evolutionary approach seem to be textbooks specifically related to evolutionary psychiatry. I'm not familiar with these authors or their work so I can't comment on them, though I am surprised not to find reference to more fundamental research on evolutionary psychology in his article.

Mental Disorders and Evolution

Soper's specific claims begin with this: "Common mental disorders are too common not to exist for a reason." By "reason", here, he means for a positive reason. Soper wants to argue that every common trait must, by definition, give us an evolutionary advantage or it wouldn't have survived (which is the most simplistic reading of evolution). But in this he is wrong. For example hair colour and eye colour are common traits and there's no plausible evolutionary advantage to having different coloured hair and eyes. By way of contrast, we know that skin tone is directly related to long term habitation in certain latitudes. If a group lives on the equator for a few thousand years their skin will be darkened by melanin. And if a group lives at 50 degrees north for thousands of years their melanin decreases and they become pale. It's a positive adaptation to the amount of sunlight and vitamin D synthesis and it occurs over relatively short time scales as evolutions goes (and thus is probably epigenetic - a change in gene expression rather than a mutation of a gene). Importantly it makes a mockery of the concept of colour-based race. One must always be alert to other sources of change or variety. One thinks also of the impact of our microbiome (the sum total of microscopic life that lives in and on our bodies and plays significant and often vital roles).

Think also of the common trait of susceptibility to being infected by viruses. On Soper's logic -- that susceptibility to depression conveys an evolutionary advantage -- our susceptibility to viral infections, such as influenza or ebola, is so common that it must also confer some evolutionary advantage. Viruses exploit vulnerabilities in surface features of our cells that evolved for other reasons. For example sperm use a similar mechanism to deliver their DNA to an ovum. These diseases are virulent and indiscriminate. Before modern medicine an influenza outbreak could kill millions of people. The 1918 influenza pandemic which killed 50-100 million people worldwide is a good example. And influenza is constantly mutating so that there is no immunity conferred from having had the disease once. The best evolutionary argument might be that such diseases weed out the weaker members of the species: i.e. that influenza is natural selection in action. This has the indirect advantage of allowing stronger members to live with less competition. In the simple version of evolution, then, we have positively evolved to allow weak members of our species to be eliminated by disease, though I don't find this a compelling argument and this the opposite of what Soper is arguing for depression. Unlike viral disease which reduces competition by killing weaker members of the species, Soper is arguing that mental illness, specifically depression, prevents those who are susceptible to suicidal ideation from actually committing suicide. Thus it acts to preserve people who carry a trait that in the cold light of day makes them less fit in an evolutionary sense (and I say this as a life-long sufferer of depression). On the face of it Soper is describing anti-evolution.

As already suggested Soper makes an extraordinary assumption in his view of evolution. He assumes that evolution is the only force at work on our mental states. Another aspect of our history he takes no account of is the massive changes that began to occur ca 12000 years ago as our ancestors began to form stable settlements: i.e. civilisation. As Robin Dunbar points out (Human Evolution) for primates being in large groups of strangers is stressful. Of course we find ways of coping with that stress - clear evidence of alcohol use begins around the same time as large scale settlements in Anatolia. 12,000 years is enough time for our skin to change the levels of melanin produced, but it is not enough time for major changes to the genome, especially under the kind of NeoDarwinian paradigm that Soper unquestioningly adopts. Dunbar, again, notes that we are evolved to live in groups of ca 150 with progressively weaker links to units of ca. 500 and ca. 1500. just as present day hunter-gathers still live. Limits are imposed on group size by the amount of neocortex in the brain which has not changed significantly in the last 200,000 years since anatomically modern humans first emerged in East Africa. We cannot keep track of more than 150 relationships (on average) and groups considerably larger lose coherence. Indeed in present day hunter gatherer society most groups spend the night in groups of about 50 that have close links (often by marriage) to two other groups of 50. City dwellers are forced to adapt to their situation by adjusting how much time they spend on the different layers of their social structure (generally more time spent with less people), but the average number of Facebook "friends" is still ca. 150.

Thus simply living in settlements creates enormous stresses on humans that no other primate has ever faced. Since civilisation brings many changes in terms of how we spend our time (eps. work) and what we eat (esp. the gross over-availability of calorie rich foods) it is clearly one of the most important factors in considering the health, mental or otherwise of modern humans. In many ways one could argue that we are not well adapted to modern life - slumped over a keyboard developing bad posture, carpal-tunnel-syndrome and occupational overuse syndrome, while gorging on foods laden with fat, salt and sugar so that we overflow the poorly designed chairs we sit on for most of our sedentary day is hardly an advert for evolution. If anything many of us are not evolutionarily fit for this environment and increasing numbers are having civilisation-related or "life-style" illnesses like coronary heart disease, type II diabetes, etc.

One of the strengths of Professor Robin Dunbar's work is his ability to compare his results with other primates and to extract evidence from fossilised remains. It allows him to take a genuinely evolutionary view of the traits he is examining by showing how things have changed over time. When we only examine modern humans, have no reliable data for change over a time scale beyond ca. 50 years, and have little reliable data from outside Europe and America the method is very much weaker. Soper presents no data from other primates on mental illness and suicide for example. I suspect that this is because there is none. Animals don't, on the whole, deliberately kill themselves though they do show analogues of some kinds of mental illness and are susceptible to addiction (at least in laboratories).

The first challenge of any evolutionary study of suicide is to try to determine when humans began to kill themselves. And of course it's impossible to tell because the kind of evidence we need is unavailable. So the theory that we evolved this behaviour is already on very shaky ground. There is no history, no fossil record, none of the evidence over time that is crucial to all evolutionary arguments. The second challenge is to explain why humans do and other primates do not kill themselves. No explanation is presented for this either, except that Soper simply states that it must have an evolved in humans. Indeed he treats present rates of suicide as evidence of suicidality as part of "human nature". Now there is a slippery concept if ever there was one: human nature. It's entirely out of place in a scientific article. And the idea that present data represent historical data is simply mistaken. All we know for sure is that there are some ancient literary records of suicide (see my article Suicide as a Response to Suffering for a survey of suicide in the Pāli texts; where, coincidently, alcohol is described as leading to madness). We can associate suicide with settled human culture, for a few thousand years, but there is no evidence whatever for the evolution of suicide, it's simply an assumption that everything evolved because in the paradigm every trait is the positive result of evolution.

"Other addictive, obsessive and compulsive behaviours may function as dis-tractions, effectively keep-ing a person in danger of suicide mentally and physically preoccupied.

Depression may be understood equally as a means to incapacitate a potentially suicidal indivi-dual:" (Soper p.2)

Soper cites a number of opinions on suicide and its aetiology, but noticeably absent is the monumental, if a little dated, study of suicide by Durkheim. One of Durkheim's main points is that suicide seems to be strongly associated with social isolation. This jibes well with other evolutionary psychology authors. As social animals we thrive if and only if we are part of a thriving community. Modern humans evolved for participation in a community of ca. 150 people. In fact we moderns frequently live in massive conglomerations of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people almost all of whom are strangers. Modern life allows a sizeable minority to become isolated and alienated from society. Many moderns live in social isolation to some degree. We're surrounded by strangers and have none of the intimate exchanges that bond primate groups, not even the sublimated activities of laughing, singing, dancing or praying together (cf Dunbar). What the effects of this have been over the long term, we are only just beginning to understand. Clearly some thrive in this new configuration, but some do not. And those who do not, I would argue, are those who develop so-called mental illness. Of course there are other, often organic, causes of mental illness as well and this is not a causal argument yet, but highlighting a correlation that begs to be investigated. Importantly, there is no unitary phenomenon here that can be ascribed to a single simple cause. Not even the depression that Soper focusses on has a singular aetiology. But Durkheim's original observations on suicide seem to stand up.

Soper argues that (3) "When two traits routinely occur together in this way, it is reasonable to infer that a single process is at work behind both..." By two traits here, Soper is specifically referring to addiction and depression. His solution is argue that depression, with its associated lethargy, contributes to suppression of the suicidal ideation that occurs in the addict. This assumption appears to stem from his conclusion, not the other way around. He also flirts with the fallacy that correlation indicates causation. Certainly a strong correlation is interesting and deserves further study, but I doubt it is reasonable to infer from the outset that a common mechanism is at work when there's no common mechanism for depression in it's various forms nor one for suicide.

Importantly Soper presents a caricature of depression as involving lethargy. But he does not account for the phenomenon of depression associated with irritability and anger that is common, but under-reported and poorly understood, in men. Cf. Irritability, Anger Indicators of Complex, Severe Depression; or Depression & Men. Indeed the popular media representation of depression often focusses on women who have a big collapse, can't get out of bed for 6 months and then recover. That's not typical of depressed men, nor for the people who suffer repeated bouts of major depression or those who suffer long-term depression. The different aetiology of depression in men may be why men are twice as likely (15 per 100k) than women (8 per 100k) to commit suicide (WHO). Some will say that men need to talk about their problems more, but this is a simplistic and unhelpful generalisation. I've commented on this elsewhere so won't say more here. But if a supposedly singular problem is characterised by at least two unrelated traits (lethargy or anger), manifests differently in the sexes, and can be acute or chronic, then we've most likely been too superficial in our explanation and need to look more deeply. There's no one problem called "depression".

One of the most important and productive ways of looking at depression is to see the popular "chemical imbalance" explanation as having a behavioural cause. Over-stimulation of various brain mechanisms leads to problems. Constant anxiety—with activation of flight-or-fight response—can lead to lethargy and unresponsiveness, both characteristics of depression (I first experimented with this by examining the fight-or-flight response of earthworms more than 30 years ago for a high-school science class). Over-stimulation of pleasure mechanisms (through drugs, porn, eating, etc.) leads to an inability to experience pleasure—both through endorphin mediated pleasure/well-being, and through dopamine mediated anticipation and reward—also characteristic of depression. I can offer no explanation of the anger or rage felt by depressed men as yet.

One observable result is consistently lower serotonin levels in depressed people. But even after many decades there is no evidence for a causal relationship between serotonin (a hormone that has multiple roles in the body) and depression. Indeed the fact that antidepressants raise serotonin levels almost immediately, but (when they do work) take two to four weeks to lift mood, suggests something far more complex is going on.

Soper is also interested in the co-morbidity of depression and addiction. Robin Dunbar makes an interesting aside in Human Evolution. Alcoholics do not become addicted to alcohol per se, they become addicted to the endorphins that alcohol stimulates. Endorphins are one of the primary hormones produced in primates by mutual grooming and produce the sense of well being and contentment that comes from being a well established group member. Laughing, singing, and dancing in groups have the same hormonal effect. We're 30 times more likely to laugh at a comedy in a group than we are alone. This is consistent with the neuroanatomy of pleasure that I outlined in The Science of Pleasure, based largely on a book called The compass of Pleasure by David Linden (well reviewed here). See also my 2013 essay Pleasure, Desire and Buddhism.

Addicts, according to David J Linden's recent account of addiction, overstimulate the part of their brain that is also responsible for the feelings of well-being associated with positive social interactions. Addicts who over-stimulate this function, progressively become unable to experience that feeling of well being, or only associate it with their drug of choice (the exception being nicotine addicts who use the frequent but weak stimulation of smoking as a way of bonding). There are in fact at least two mechanisms working in tandem: addicts gradually become less able to experience well-being and/or pleasure in the absence of their drug; and they make poor decisions and become unreliable as a result of the effects of the drug and thus become socially isolated. All too often drug abuse is initiated by some lingering unhappiness or dissatisfaction that might have led to, or already caused, depression anyway. The obvious example is that abuse and neglect in their various forms, especially at crucial developmental stages, can leave people vulnerable to depression.

By Robin Dunbar's argument, social alcohol use persists, despite the risk of addiction in some people, because it plays an important role in allowing us to operate in larger groups than we would otherwise have time for (with all the benefits that large groups provide). Disinhibition makes for fun, laughter, singing and other promoters of a sense of well-being and communality. This is not natural selection in the usual sense, in that we are not genetically programmed to make and consume ethanol, but it is natural selection in that societies which used alcohol to enhance social bonding seem to have prospered.

These mechanisms that mediate the experience of pleasure, well-being, and anticipation and reward clearly have evolved and we know them in quite a lot of detail now: which areas of the brain are involved, when those areas evolved, which neurotransmitters are involved and the more generalised impact of disrupting these mechanisms. Any evolutionary approach to mood disorders or addiction really needs to get to grips with these mechanisms and show how they are involved, preferably by citing clinical evidence, just as Dunbar and Linden do and Soper does not.

Soper speculates that addiction might "distract" the person from acting on suicidal impulses. Some addicts use substances in an attempt to control how they feel, to compensate for the lack of pleasure or reward or to suppress feelings of shame or anger. But is this really an evolutionary argument? Does our potential to abuse substances really convey an advantage? In the end the substance of choice in addiction is often the means of suicide (albeit slowly), just as many depressives over-dose on their anti-depressant medication. Is the alcoholic who does not commit suicide, but whose behaviour causes the breakdown of supportive familial and working relationships, and who suffers liver and brain damage really ahead on points? The deleterious effects of drugs during pregnancy are so severe (e.g. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome) that they must surely outweigh any perceived advantage from merely being alive to pass on one's genes. Soper's argument here is facile at best.

Conclusion

Soper's key claim is that the lethargy commonly associated with depression acts as a defence against suicidal ideation. Maybe. But we also know that people with depression are far more likely to commit suicide that people without it. So if it is a mechanism, it's not a very good one. One suicide prevention website reckons that [in the USA] "15% of those who are clinically depressed die by suicide." and "The strongest risk factor for suicide is depression." (Save) Suicidal ideation and impulses are one of the most common features of the experience of depression.

Suicide is a terrible problem. It is the fifteenth most common cause of death worldwide (WHO). Depression is a leading cause of suicide (and to date I think it is under estimated because of the failure to fully recognise how it affects men). When someone kills themselves their family and friends are often left shocked, sad and angry. Suicide often seems like a betrayal. On top of everything, people are angry because the suicide has broken off the relationship, has not reached out, has not apparently reciprocated the love they feel. Death is never easy, but to most people suicide seems so preventable because it involves a conscious choice. As @sarahdoingthing says it's hard to understand because it is sui generis (self generated). How do the living empathise with the wish to be dead? Mostly they do not. The difficulty is to see how the choice is made by a disordered mind in a person who has frequently lost the ability to experience a sense of connection and does not have the perspective to see that the situation is temporary. Depression feels like solitary confinement.

Because it's so difficult to imagine what depression or addiction is like, most people who have not experienced it find they cannot empathise easily with sufferers. Very often the problems are ascribed to personal weakness such as a "weak will" or a moral failing (an example of the fundamental attribution fallacy). This can have the effect of increasing the social isolation of the person afflicted with depression. This is part of the stigma of mental illness.

The best thing you can offer someone who suffers is to listen to them without judgement and deal with your own discomfort discreetly. Whatever you do, don't offer unsolicited advice. If you're concerned about someone's safety encourage them to seek professional help. If you feel certain someone will harm themselves take whatever action you feel appropriate, but don't expect to be thanked (at least not right away).

In any case we need to be careful when constructing arguments based on evolution. It is no doubt a powerful and at present fashionable explanatory framework. There's no doubt in my mind that we evolved into our present form. But modern humans are unusual in the animal world in having the ability to over-ride evolution using culture and civilisation. While our genes are the blueprint for our neuro-anatomy, experience is a powerful shaper (both literally and figuratively) of the brain.

Without clear evidence of change over time evolution is a weak explanation. It may well be the explanation, but we cannot show why. Sometimes a trait has an obvious evolutionary advantage - language, mentalising, and laughter all provide demonstrable advantages and fit well with other areas of the theory. The potential to suppress suicidal impulses might confer an advantage, or it might have a deleterious effect on the population. Who is to say that suicide is not an instrument of natural selection? How do we weigh up the costs and benefits in these complex problems? I find no answer in Soper's article.

Even though we can identify commonalities depression and addiction likewise have multiple causes. When combining traits with many causes we multiply the complexity. Seeking unitary causes for complex problems is understandable, but often leads to fallacious thinking. Seeking a single generalised evolutionary explanation in terms of conferred advantage looks ideological. And in this case the premise looks flawed at best. So the interpretation of the data is unlikely to be trustworthy. For all these reasons I find Soper's theory unconvincing. Scarily, Soper is already making suggestions on implications for therapy as though his theory was sound.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Barrett, J.L. (2004) Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

Dunbar, R.I.M. (1992). 'Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates.'Journal of Human Evolution 22 (6): 469–493. doi:10.1016/0047-2484(92)90081-J

Dunbar, Robin. (2014) Human Evolution: a Pelican Introduction. Pelican.

Durkheim, Emile. (1897) Suicide : a study in sociology. The Free Press, 1951.

Jayarava. (2004) 'Suicide as a Response to Suffering.'Western Buddhist Review.

Linden, David J. (2011) The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good. Viking.

C A Soper. "Anti-suicide mechanisms as a general evolutionary explanation for common mental disorders". University of Gloucester.

Mahākātyāna
Stele, Korea.

This text is "hidden" because even though it has been translated into English (Choong 2010), it has not been discussed in relation to the other versions of the text so far as I'm aware. What tends to happen is that when the text is mentioned, scholars think of the Pāli version or the Sanskrit passage cited by Candrakīrti in his commentary on Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamaka Kārikā which mentions the Kātyāyana Sūtra (MMK 15.7). I'm hoping to give some prominence to the other versions of which two are in Chinese.

The Pali Kaccānagotta Sutta (SN 12.15 = KP) is quoted verbatim in the Channa Sutta (SN 22.90; iii.132-5) and as such is of little interest except that when a text is cited by another text we get a sense of relative dating: it implies chronology. In the Chinese Saṃyuktāgama, the counterpart of the Channa Sutta (CC; SĀ 262 = T 2.99 66c01-c18) also quotes the Chinese counterpart of the Kātyāyana Sūtra (KC; SĀ 301), but in this case the text is different in some interesting ways. And thus we have a fourth version of the text: KP, KS, KC and now CC.

Most significant is how the two Chinese versions deal with a partic-ularly difficult paragraph that in Pali and Sanskrit reads:

KP: dvayanissito khvāyaṃkaccāna loko yebhuyyena atthitañceva natthitañca.Upayupādānābhinivesavinibandho khvāyaṃ, kaccāna, loko yebhuyyena.Tañcāyaṃ upayupādānaṃ cetaso adhiṭṭhānaṃ abhinivesānusayaṃna upeti na upādiyati nādhiṭṭhāti ‘attā me’ti.

“Generally, Kaccāna, this world relies on a dichotomy: existence and non-existence.” Usually, Kaccāna, this world is bound to the tendency to grasping and attachment.And he does not attach, does not grasp, is not based on that biased, obstinate tendency of the mind to attachment and grasping: [i.e.] “[this is] my essence”.

~~~

KS: dvayaṃniśrito ’yaṃkātyāyana lokoyadbhūyasāstitāñcaniśrito nāstitāñ ca | Upadhyupādānavinibaddho ’yaṃ kātyāyanaloko yad utāstitāñ ca niśritonāstitāñ ca | etāni ced upadhyupādānāni cetaso ’dhiṣṭhānābhiniveśānuśayān nopaiti nopādatte nādhitiṣṭhati nābhiniviśaty ātmā meti |

“Generally, Kātyāyana, this world relies on a dichotomy: it relies on existence and non-existence.This world, which relies on existence and non-existence, is bound by attachments and grasping. If he does not attach to these, does not grasp, is not based on or devoted tothe biased, obstinate tendency of the mind to attachments and grasping:“[this is] my essence”.

~~~

Notes

The syntax here is tortuous and in addition contains some distracting word play. The nouns in the green section are from the same roots as the verbs in the orange section. Both Chinese versions replicate this same structure. It's possible that the nouns and verbs are meant to be understood as linked: upāyaṃ with na upeti; upādānaṃ with na upādiyati and so on, but at this stage I'm unsure. The Sanskrit is more difficult to parse because of the "if" (ced) and the Pali seems like a better reading for not having it.

Note that P "attā me"& Skt "ātmā me" appear to be references to the formula often used with reference to the skandhas. Here wrong view would be of the form:

rūpaṃ etam mama, eso’ham amsi, eso me attā ti samanupassati.
He considers form: “it is mine”; “I am this”; “this is my essence”.

Our text hints that the duality of existence (astitā) and non-existence (nāstitā) arises from the same wrong view. Indeed seeing experience in terms of existence and non-existence is probably at the heart of interpreting it as "mine", "I" or "my essence".

The Saṃyuktāgama text translated into Chinese was evidently similar to the Sanskrit of KS and carried out by Guṇabhadra in the 5th century CE. Even non-Chinese-readers will see there are similarities and differences in the two Chinese versions of this paragraph, which I've marked up using the same colour scheme as above for comparison.

KC: “世間有二種依， 若有、若無，為取所觸；取所觸故，或依有、或依無。若無此取者。心境繫著。使不取、不住、不計我。

KC: “Among the worldly (世間) two categories are relied on: being and non-[being]. Because of having grasping the touched, they either rely on being or non-being.If he is not a seizer of that , he doesn’t have the obstinate mental state of attachment; he doesn’t insist on, or think wrongly about ‘I’.”

~~~

CC: 『世人顛倒依於二邊，若有、若無，世人取諸境界，心便計著。迦旃延！若不受、不取、不住、不計於我，

CC: “Wordly people (世人) who are topsy-turvy (顛倒) rely on (依) two extremes (二邊): existence (若有) and non-existence (若無). Worldly people (世人) generally (諸) adhere to (取) perceptual objects (境界)[because of] because of biased, obstinate tendency of the mind (心便計著) Kātyāyana: if not appropriating (受), not obtaining (取), not abiding (住), not attached to or relying on ‘I’...”

~~~

The first difference is in interpreting Skt/P. loka. KC translates 世間 while CC has 世人: "in the world" versus "worldly people". CC adds that the worldly people are 顛倒 "top-down" or "upside-down" or "topsy-turvy". Choong translates "confused", which is perfectly good, but there's a connotation in Buddhist jargon of viparyāsa (c.f. DDB sv 顛倒) which refers to mistaking the impermanent for the permanent and so on.

KC and CC both translate niśrito/nissito as 依. But they again differ in how they convey dvayam: KC 二種 "two varieties" and CC 二邊 "two sides". The character 邊 often translates Skt. anta which is significant because the word crops up later in the text in the Sanskrit and Pali: Skt:

ity etāv ubhāv antāv anupagamya madhyamayā pratipadā tathāgato dharmaṃ deśayati |

Thus, the Tathāgata teaches the Dharma by a middle path avoiding both these extremes.

KC and CC both use 二邊 in this latter passage. It makes more sense to refer to "two extremes" (antau; in the dual) early on if that's what's talked about later, especially when by "later" we mean just three sentences later. Thus CC provides better continuity than KC.

The next part of this section is where the two texts differ most markedly.

KC: Because of having grasping the touched (取所觸), they either rely on being or rely on non-being (或依有、或依無). If [he is] not a seizer of that (若無此取者), he doesn't have the obstinate mental state of attachment (心境繫著).

CC: worldly people generally (境 ) adhere and attach to 計著 objects of the mind (界心). Kātyāyana: if not appropriating (受), not obtaining (取), not abiding (住), not attached to or relying on “I”...

(Choong "Worldlings become attached to all spheres, setting store by and grasping with the mind.")

In KC we have some confusion around the phrase 取所觸. In Choong's translation of KC (40) he wants to have it mean “This grasping and adhering" but that's not what it appears to say and in any case no dictionary I have access to translates 觸 chù as ‘adhere’ or anything like it. On face value, and taking into account Buddhist Chinese it says "grasping what is touched": 取 = Skt. upādāna; 所 = relative pronoun; 觸 = Skt. sparśa< √spṛś'touch'. In other words Guṇabhadra seems to have made a mistake here. I think Choong is tacitly amending the text to correct it, probably based on reading the Pali.

Elsewhere KS seems to be defective: KP has upay(a)-upādāna-abhinivesa-vinibandha‘bound by the tendency to attachment and grasping’ whereas KS has upadhy-upādāna-vinibaddho, missing out abhinivesa, which doesn't really make sense. Upadhi is out of place here and probably a mistake for upāya. It may be that the source text for KC was also defective.

Note that CC has abbreviated the text. The green section of KC repeats some of the first red section, but CC eliminates the repetition and makes the paragraph easier to read overall.

The Chinese texts both run on to include the next section, although it's clear from KP and KS that the next part is a separate sentence.

Conclusion

"In short, when reading any given line of a Chinese Buddhist sūtra—excepting perhaps those produced by someone like Hsüan-tsang, who is justifiably famous for his accuracy—we have a roughly equal chance of encountering an accurate reflection of the underlying Indian original or a catastrophic misunderstanding."

Jan Nattier. A Few Good Men. p.71

As a warning this might be slightly overstated for effect and it is qualified by Nattier who says that multiple translations make it easier for the scholar. But it's often true that in order to really get what a Chinese text is on about, one must use the Indic (Pāḷi, Saṃskṛta, Gāndhārī) text as a commentary. This is partly because Buddhist Chinese is full of transliterations and jargon. Words are used in ways that are specific to a Buddhist context and must be read as technical terms. Buddhist Chinese very often uses something approximating Sanskrit syntax (Chinese is an SVO language while Sanskrit is SOV). The paragraph we have been considering is a good example of this phenomena as the Chinese apes the syntax of the Sanskrit.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that KC and CC were translated by different people and that the translator of CC did a slightly better job than the translator of KC. So perhaps the named translator, Guṇabhadra, was a sort of editor-in-chief working with a team? This was a common way of creating Chinese translations. Or perhaps he translated the same passage twice and did it differently each time? Though this seems less likely.

By comparison with the Pāli Tipiṭaka we expect KC and CC to be identical, as the quotation of KP in the Channa Sutta is verbatim. The fact that they are not raises questions about the source text for the Samyuktāgama translated in Chinese. Having different translations into Chinese is valuable because it is precisely where KC is difficult that CC is different and arguably clearer. But perhaps the different translations are because the source text itself was different? KS is different from KP in other ways, and different from citations in later literature. This points to a number of versions of the text being in circulation of which we have a sample in the various canons.

So often the Chinese Tripiṭaka contains little that conflicts with the Pāḷi Tipiṭaka. But sometimes, as in this case, the differences are instructive, especially where versions in Sanskrit and/or Gāndhārī survive. We're now starting to see the treatment of Pali and Chinese versions of texts side by side in articles about early Buddhism. No doubt the publication of canonical translations into English, which has begun, will facilitate this. Certainly Early Buddhism is no longer synonymous with Theravāda and Pāḷi.

My close reading of all four Kātyāyana texts is slowly becoming a journal article. A subsequent project will be to explore the many citations of the text in Mahāyāna Sūtras. Exact citations or mentions of the same idea can be found in at least the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra and the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra, and also in Nāgarjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā and especially in Chandrakīrti's commentary on MMK, Prasannapāda. Thus the text and the ideas in it were foundational to the Mahāyāna and provide an important thread of continuity, between the first two great phases of Buddhist thought.

~~oOo~~

Worried

This essay discusses the Aniccavaggo (the Section on Impermanence) in Saṃyutta 35 (Saḷāyatanā the six sense bases) in the fourth book of the Saṃyutta Nikāya (SN iv.1ff). The key words nibbindati, virajjati and vimuccati mark these passages as relating to the third stage of the Spiral Path, the stage of paññā (Skt prajñā) which I will translate here as "understanding". These texts lay out, in a very accessible way, some important ideas with regard to what Buddhists are seeking to understand. At least for the early Buddhists, understanding has a specific domain and content.

I'll present my translation the first text of the section (with notes on the 2nd and third which differ only by substituting dukkha and anattan for anicca) and then discuss the texts afterwards. There are 12 texts in this section, but we can easily summarise them because there is considerable repetition with minor variation. Each text is presented with more or less identical wording focussing first on impermanence (anicca), then on disappointment (dukkha), and finally on insubstantiality (anattan); and each of these is repeated from the "subjective" (ajjhatta) and "objective" (bāhira) points of view; and finally with respect to the past, present and future giving twelve variations on the basic text. Only the first text in the section has a tradition nidāna or framing narrative.

1. Ajjhattāniccasuttaṃ ~ 2. Ajjhattadukkhasuttaṃ ~ 3. Ajjhattānattasuttaṃ
The Suttas on Subjective Impermanence, Disappointment and Non-identification. (SN 35: 1-3)

1. Evaṃ me sutaṃ. Ekaṃ samayaṃ bhagavā sāvatthiyaṃ viharati jetavane anāthapiṇḍikassa ārāme. Tatra kho bhagavā bhikkhū āmantesi – ‘‘bhikkhavo’’ti. ‘‘Bhadante’’ti te bhikkhū bhagavato paccassosuṃ. Bhagavā etadavoca –

Thus I heard. One time the Bhagavan was staying in Sāvatthī in the Jeta Grove or Anāthapiṇḍika's park. Right there the Bhagavan addressed the bhikkhus: "bhikkhus!"
"Sir?", the bhikkhus replied.
This is what the Bhagavan said:

‘‘Cakkhuṃ, bhikkhave, aniccaṃ. Yadaniccaṃ taṃ dukkhaṃ; yaṃ dukkhaṃ tadanattā. Yadanattā taṃ ‘netaṃ mama, nesohamasmi, na meso attā’ti evametaṃ yathābhūtaṃ sammappaññāya daṭṭhabbaṃ. Sotaṃ aniccaṃ. Yadaniccaṃ…pe… ghānaṃ aniccaṃ. Yadaniccaṃ…pe… jivhā aniccā. Yadaniccaṃ taṃ dukkhaṃ; yaṃ dukkhaṃ tadanattā. Yadanattā taṃ ‘netaṃ mama, nesohamasmi, na meso attā’ti evametaṃ yathābhūtaṃ sammappaññāya daṭṭhabbaṃ. Kāyo anicco. Yadaniccaṃ…pe… mano anicco. Yadaniccaṃ taṃ dukkhaṃ; yaṃ dukkhaṃ tadanattā. Yadanattā taṃ ‘netaṃ mama, nesohamasmi, na meso attā’ti evametaṃ yathābhūtaṃ sammappaññāya daṭṭhabbaṃ.

The eye is impermanent [2. disappointing; 3. Insubstantial]. What is impermanent is disappointing. What is disappointing cannot be identified with a Self. Of that which cannot be identified with [we say] "It is not mine; I am not this; this is not my Self." Just this is to be seen as it is, with perfect understanding (samma-paññā). The ear is impermanent, etc The nose, etc, The tongue, etc. The body, etc

Evaṃ passaṃ, bhikkhave, sutavā ariyasāvako cakkhusmimpi nibbindati, sotasmimpi nibbindati, ghānasmimpi nibbindati, jivhāyapi nibbindati, kāyasmimpi nibbindati, manasmimpi nibbindati. Nibbindaṃ virajjati; virāgā vimuccati; vimuttasmiṃ vimuttamiti ñāṇaṃ hoti. ‘Khīṇā jāti, vusitaṃ brahmacariyaṃ, kataṃ karaṇīyaṃ, nāparaṃ itthattāyā’ti pajānātī’’ti.

Seeing this way, bhikkhus, the educated insightful disciple, is disenchanted with the eye; disenchanted with the ear, disenchanted with the nose, disenchanted with the tongue, disenchanted with the mind. Being disenchanted they can disentangle themselves. Having disentangled themselves, they are freed. Being free there is the knowledge "I am free". They know: "birth is ended; the religious life is fulfilled; the task is completed; I'll never be reborn."

The other texts in the section are:

4. Bāhirāniccasuttaṃ
5. Bāhiradukkhasuttaṃ6. Bāhirānattasuttaṃ

The Suttas on Objective Impermanence, Disappointment and Non-identification.

7. Ajjhattāniccātītānāgatasuttaṃ 8. Ajjhattadukkhātītānāgatasuttaṃ
9. Ajjhattānattātītānāgatasuttaṃ

The Suttas on Past and Future Subjective Impermanence, Disappointment and Non-identification.

10. Bāhirāniccātītānāgatasuttaṃ 11. Bāhiradukkhātītānāgatasuttaṃ 12. Bāhirānattātītānāgatasuttaṃ.

The Suttas on Past and Future Objective Impermanence, Disappointment and Non-identification.

Discussion

I've made the point about the domain of application for paṭiccasamuppāda many times, but not for a while. So to reiterate, these texts confirm the summary found in the Sabba Sutta. The domain of application of paṭiccasamuppāda is the sensory world; that is to say the domain of experience.

Here we focus on the two aspects of sense experience: the "subjective" (internal = ajjhatta) aspect in terms of the eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mind; and the "objective" (external = bāhira) in the sense of forms, sounds, odours, tastes, tactile sensations and mental-activity. This is a relatively unsophisticated view of sensory perception in which the eye does the action of seeing as well as all the processing that we now associate with the brain. The eye passes on the seen to the manas which carries out the other functions, such as naming (saññā) and attraction/repulsion (saṅkhārā), etc. Both subjective and objective aspects of experience are treated identically.

I'm usually wary of the terms subjective and objective for reasons I've spelled out in previous essays (See esp. Subjective & Objective). The term here is purely epistemological. The experience of seeing a form has two aspects: the seen and the seeing. No ontological conclusions can be drawn from this. From the mere experience of seeing a form we cannot know the nature of the form nor of the eye. Where form is defined, it is defined in experiential terms: colour, resistance, shape, texture. In the Buddhist description of experience both form and eye—i.e. both sense object (alambana) and sense faculty (indriya) —are necessary for the arising of sense cognition (viññāna) and the three together give rise to a sensory experience (vedanā "a known", "a datum"). There are no pure forms or ideas as in Plato's account of phenomena and noumena. Indeed noumena are implicitly denied here and elsewhere.

Later Buddhism insists that the subject/object distinction is just something we impose on experience, an argument which is itself based on deep meditative experience. But even when the distinction is acknowledged, as it is here, there is no difference in treatment, no suggestion of ontological speculation or position taking. Even in form etc., there is nothing in experience to identify with.

The object of knowing and seeing (ñānadassana), then, is the process of sensory perception. It is not "reality". When we say that we see "things" as they really are (yathābhūta), we do not mean "things" in the the general sense of "everything" (reality) but specifically we mean the things experience. We may choose to generalise this into a Theory of Everything, but this generalisation creates many philosophical problems of the kind that Buddhist philosophers are still arguing about. As a theory of why experience is disappointing the traditional account is still quite workable and based on sound foundations that will make it relevant for the foreseeable future. The rest, the arguments about the nature of reality and all that (all ontological arguments), are already anachronistic and irrelevant.

It is evametaṃ 'just this' relation to sense experience that is to be seen with perfect understanding (samma-paññā; Skt. samyak-prajñā). In Buddhist jargon, right-view consists in correctly seeing experience as it is. To take this statement in context, we know that a similar analysis is carried out with regard to the khandhas (the factors of experience). So neither the factors of experience, nor the content of experience, nor any aspect of experience, is permanent. And what is impermanent is disappointing; and what is disappointing cannot be our Self. This logic is almost certainly drawn from the Brahmanical sphere. It represents a direct contradiction of the Vedantic ideal of saccidānanda. These are the three characteristics (trilakṣaṇa) of brahman/ātman: being (sat < √as), consciousness (cit) and bliss (ānanda). But we know that the early Buddhists denied that experience has being. In fact neither existence (astitā < √as) nor non-existence (na-astitā) apply to the domain of experience. And because experience is anicca it is dukkha rather than sukkha; sukkha being a synonym for ānanda. Nothing that is dukkha can possibly ātman or brahman. This parallel between Buddhist and Vedantic thought was established by K R Norman (1981).

The Buddhist analysis blocks identification with any aspect of experience as our essence, self, soul or any enduring entity - which is why I'm suggesting "non-identification" as a translation of anattan (Skt. anātman). If ātman means 'myself' (reflexive pronoun) then an-ātman can be seen as a bahuvrīhi compound: "without a myself", "non-self-referential". Since absolutely every experience is impermanent, disappointing and non-self-referential even if we did have a soul, we'd never have access to knowledge of it, since knowledge is mental and thus an aspect of the experiential domain. If we can know something permanent, then if we do not presently know it, we'll never know it; or if we presently know it, we've always known it and always will. Ignorance of a soul is either impossible or absolute, precisely because the soul is defined as permanent. Thus if we don't know now, we never will. This is the essence of the argument that Nāgārjuna went on to make about dharmas having svabhāva (See Emptiness for Beginners).

Note also that, though many Buddhists claim that bodhi has no intellectual content, this text and countless others like it, ascribe a very specific content to the experience of vimutti. Firstly one knows that having become disenchanted with the sensory world and losing interest in the froth of the play of thoughts and emotions one has disentangled oneself from it all. We cease to suspend our disbelief in the play of senses and see sense experience as it is (yathābhūta). There is nothing here about seeing reality. And being free from entanglement, free from the automatic moving towards attractive sensations and automatic moving away from repulsive sensations, we know that we are free. Interestingly this is expressed in the first person: vimuttami (i.e. vimuttaṃ asmi) 'I am freed'. But then there are a series of realisations related to the ending of rebirth. Being free from automatic responses one cannot carry out the kind of actions that contribute to rebirth. One is free in the precise sense of being free from rebirth.

Those who do not believe in rebirth have yet to propose an alternative understanding of this process of disenchantment and what it signifies. This maybe because so few of the proponents of a no-rebirth (apunabhava) Buddhism have experienced liberation for themselves. We won't have a truly modern Buddhism until we have a number of credible first-hand accounts of liberation in rationalist terms. As far as I know most people who have insight still resort to traditional narratives to describe their experience. This may be because the traditionalists are more motivated to practice with sufficient intensity.

~~oOo~~

Norman, K. R. (1981) 'A Note on Attā in the Alagaddūpama Sutta.' Studies in Indian Philosophy LD Series, 84 – 1981

This question is one of the most interesting and most difficult to answer of all the interesting questions that scientists seek answers for. Language is one of the defining characteristics of humans. Yes, some animals do have relatively sophisticated signs they use with each other, but language in all it's glory – phonology, morphology, syntax and grammar – is something that sets humans apart. Robin Dunbar's recent book Pelican Introduction to Human Evolution (2014) has a nice little essay on the subject (235-244) that I'll attempt to précis here.

In fact the question when did language evolve devolves into two questions:

When did humans evolve the capability for language?
When did humans begin to use language.

Before we examine the evidence we need to quickly outline Dunbar's main themes. The book draws on two main fields of research other than anthropology and paleo-anthropology. Dunbar's main work is on what he calls The Social Brain Hypothesis. Dunbar found a correlation between the ratio of neo-cortex to brain size (volume) and the size of groups in social animals. Taking certain other factors into account, the correlation allows Dunbar to accurately predict the average group size for any social animal. In fact social animals occupy the centre of a series of concentric groups of increasing size. For humans it turns out that the numbers are (approximately): 5, 15, 50, 150, 500, 1500. These numbers correspond to structures within human groups. The community has 150 and this is the most famous Dunbar Number. 150 is the mean size of communities in the Doomsday Book for example. (see 70-71 for a range of other correlations). The SBH says we can only keep track of the business (mates, kin, alliances etc) of about 150 other people. We might know 500 by name and 1500 or more people by sight, but we won't know about their likes and dislikes or their relationships with other group members. Chimpanzee's by contrast live in communities of about 50 and don't have the larger groupings. Using this correlation Dunbar is able to calculate what size of groups our distant ancestors lived in. And this leads to the second field of research.

Social animals have an extra time pressure that solitary animals do not. As well as feeding, resting and mating, social animals have to socialise, or put effort into maintaining social links. Primates do this primarily by grooming each other (though bonobo chimps also use sexual activity). Grooming causes both partners to produced endorphins, thus creating a sense of well-being. By studying living primates we can see how much time they spend doing various activities and build up models called Time Budgets. In groups of 150 there is simply not enough time to do everything. In order to maintain these large groups we need to do more than eat raw vegetation and pick fleas of each other. Dunbar explores how we might have responded to the time pressure of larger groups. For example cooking food increases the calories available and decreases the amount of time needed for feeding. Singing and dancing together also create a sense of well-being in a group, and do so far more efficiently than one-to-one grooming.

Some physical changes associated with language use occur at the same time as changes in our brain size that coincide with living in larger group sizes. So there is no doubt that language use is correlated with changes in the brain, but we're not sure yet whether it was causal and in which direction.

The Evidence

Dunbar considers a range of evidence in trying to answer the question of when humans began to use language. Some of it does not tell us much in the long run. For example the lateralisation of the brain—into left and right, with the left side slightly larger—was once seen as an important development. However, it's not language specific. For all we know it might be related to right-handed spear throwing (in humans) and in fact the same lateralisation is present in prehistoric sharks. The emergence of symbolism—as in cave painting and grave goods—has also been seen as significant. The use of symbolism starts around 40,000 bp which is interesting, but post dates some of the other developments (below) very considerably.

There is also genetic evidence. But again the genes cited—FoxP2 and MYH16—lack specificity. Because mutation in FoxP2 is associated with speech and grammar difficulties, it's still sometimes called "the language gene". However, for example, mice were recently implanted with the FoxP2 gene and did not start talking. What they did do is learn better, in particularly they found "...it easier to transform new experiences into routine procedures." FoxP2 is now known to be shared with Neanderthals and thus to be at least 800,000 years old (the last common ancestor of Neanderthals and Archaic Modern Humans). MYH16 is even older at 2.4 Million years. Inactivation of MYH16 decreases the size of the jaw and associated muscles. The argument being, though this cannot be substantiated, that it made speaking possible. Thus the genetic evidence is also, to date, inconclusive. Language use being such a complex task suggests that no one gene is going to be more than a tiny part of a larger story.

In terms of anatomy we can look at the thoracic nerves, the hypoglossal canal in the skull, the position of the hyoid bone, and the ear canals. Thoracic nerves control the chest and diaphragm and since breath control is required for speech we expect to see significant enlargement of these nerves in modern humans. The hypoglossal canal is where cranial nerve XII, which "innervates the tongue and mouth" emerges from the skull. Both are significantly larger in modern humans than in apes. Sketchy fossil records suggest that Homo Heidelbergensis, Neanderthals and Archaic Modern Humans (AMH) all had human-like values for these nerves. The hyoid bone connects the base of the tongue to the top of the larynx and in humans is positioned low allowing us to make certain sounds, particularly the vowels. Neanderthals also seem to have had low hyoid bones. Finally the ear canals, as well as providing us with balance also allow us to hear. We know that chimp and human canals differ in ways that affect how we hear speech. 500,000 year old AMHs had similar ear canals to humans.

The physical evidence suggests that many of the key anatomical changes were in place for humans (and Neanderthals) to start speaking roughly 500,000 years bp. Dunbar notes that this coincides with when the time demands for grooming would have risen above 20% of available time.

"it is very likely that a more complex vocal repertoire evolved quite early on in hominin evolution in response to increasing group size." (241).

In fact we see parallels in the complexity of some bird calls (chickadees). There is also direct evidence that primate facial and gestural repertoires increase in complexity with increasing group size (241).

A key ability some social animals have is the ability to form impressions of the intentions of another animal. This is called mentalising. Social animals need to know the disposition of the other members of their community and have developed the ability to infer this from clues such as posture, facial expressions and tone of voice. One of the main things we do with language is report on other people. If I tell you "Brian likes Mary" you must understand your own mind, my mind, and Brian's mind: that's 3rd order mentalising. No doubt you'd probably wonder whether Mary knows that you know that I told you that Brian likes her, and how she would respond to this and that's 4th order. Humans average out at being capable of 5th order mentalising. This ability to mentalise bares "an uncanny resemblance to the embeddedness of clauses in the grammatical structure of sentences" (242): e.g. Shakespeare attempts to have us, the audience, believe that Othello thinks that Iago is telling the truth when he says that Desdemona returns the love that Cassio has for her. Understanding this play requires the audience to use 5th order mentalising. Shakespeare is revered as a story teller partly because he must have been able to sustain 6th order mentalising. He must have been able to see the 5th order story from our point of view.

It turns out that we can estimate mentalising capability from neuro-imaging studies of various primates. We think that Australopithecus would have managed 2nd order mentalising on average. Homo erectus and heidelbergensis averaged 3rd order, but certain members might have reached 4th order. Neanderthals averaged 4th order, but some individuals reached 5th order. And modern humans average 5th order and some reach to 6th order. So it's possible that Neanderthals had language, but it would not have been as sophisticated as ours. We also know that Neanderthals had large brains, but their increase in brain size was mainly in the occipital lobe concerned with eyesight (and their eyes were also larger than ours), whereas as Homo sapiens' increase in brain size was more in the frontal lobes, so Neanderthals may not have been capable of quite the same levels of abstraction as modern humans, but could see well in low light levels.

Putting it all together.

It seems that by 500,000 years ago we had all the physical and mental equipment for using language in place. Archaic humans and (probably) Neanderthals, were anatomically capable of using language. Physical evidence suggests language use at least by 40,000 years ago. Language being a complex phenomenon, we must look for complex conditions related to its evolution. Michael Witzel's study in comparative mythology (See: Origins of the World's Mythologies) suggests that story telling and mythology dates from at least 70,000 ybp. By the time modern humans left Africa they had well developed mythic narratives which involved abstractions and metaphors. I think this points to Modern Humans (ca 250,000-100,000 ybp) using speech in symbolic ways from very early on.

Some suggest that language developed alongside hunting of large animals, but just because we hunted together does not mean that hunting was a driver of language, as Dunbar points out: many animals hunt as packs without language. Wolves, orca, humpback whales, and dolphins all use sophisticated, coordinated hunting strategies without the need to sit down and explain everything first. More likely is that complex tool making and use was accompanied by more sophisticated communication, if not fully developed language.

We might also usefully consider work by George Lakoff into the nature of metaphor and abstraction. Both are rooted in our experience of interacting physically with the world. I think, but cannot prove, that our hand gestures as we speak are related to the metaphors of interaction we are invoking, that is to say our hands act out the interactions underlying our abstractions and metaphors. Gesture can be powerfully communicative as anyone who knows sign language will attest, and infants can learn to communicate with gestures long before they learn to speak (though the jury is still out on whether this facilitates later language development). The way signers convey metaphors also gives us potential insights into the process of using language to communicate. Language is not simply or only speech. The nature of it must be understood within paradigms of the embodied mind. Presumably at first we talked mainly about our physical interactions with the world and each other. Then we discovered the use of similes: "the man can run fast, like a cheetah"; and then the use of metaphors: "the man is a predator". This progression is creatively explored in literature in China Miéville's novel Embassytown. Presumably this all took a long time. Along with mentalising, this ability presumably also evolved in sophistication over time producing changes that any one generation might not have noticed.

Finally out of left field I would like to highlight research into "conversational grunts", these are the non-language sounds (mmm, uh, huh, ah, etc) that we make when we listen to others speaking to let the talker know we are listening. We can actually signify a great deal simply by intonation of a sound like /mmm/: affirmation, disagreement, disapproval, happiness etc. Other research into this kind of area, e.g. sound symbolism, show that communicating, especially our emotional state (and this is extremely important in socialising) can be done without semantics.

Language is not simply about communicating abstracts, though fully fledged language has this facility. Through language we communicate our disposition and socialise more effectively: language use allows us to use our time more efficiently. Language seems to have evolved alongside our larger brains and group sizes; alongside tool use and other indicators of increasing sophistication of our minds. It seems the capability was anatomically in place long before we began to use it. The communication of even archaic humans was likely a good deal more sophisticated than modern day apes.

Once language did evolve note that it constantly and rapidly changed. Language was almost certainly never a universal. Each language group (unconsciously) adapted language to reinforce group membership and identity. In the extreme we find 1000 of the worlds 7000 languages on the island of New Guinea. Language differences make inter-community communication difficult. Until the advent of civilisation language would have been a defining feature of one's identity. And this might explain why some languages developed very complex grammar that is difficult to learn except from growing up with it. Some of the changes in grammar might be explained by expanded worldviews. Trade links and the possibility of travel outside the range of one's tribe made possible by civilisation and empires, exposed us to strangers. It's worth reading Dunbar's theoretical book in conjunction with something like Jared Diamond's The World Until Yesterday which describes the day-to-day reality of hunter-gatherer life.

Dunbar's book is unique in its approach to human evolution. The combination of the Social Brain Hypothesis and Time Budget modelling allow Dunbar to draw a compelling picture of how our distance ancestors might have lived and also when they might have adopted new technologies like fire for cooking, and of course language use. A good deal of the time he is drawing directly on his own research or research conducted by members of his research group at Oxford. While we will only ever be able to infer how pre-historic humans lived from such evidence as has survived the millennia, Dunbar shows that we can obtain much more detail than before. His book takes us from SVGA to HD. Language use is in fact only a small part of the book, but it highlights the kinds of inferences that can be drawn, and of course language use is iconically human (Koko et al notwithstanding). Understanding where we came from and how we developed over time is a key task for understanding who we are now.

~~oOo~~

Books and stories have always played an important role in my life. One of my early memories is a battle of wills with a librarian over how many Asterix books I could take out. Policy said only three at a time, but I wanted them all. Later when I became a librarian I understood the policy was designed to ration a limited resource. That was the small-town library in Taupo (pop. 12,000 in 60s & 70s) where I grew up. Before we left I had discovered science-fiction and began checking out Asimov and Arthur C Clark books. We had a small book case at home with books collected mostly by my mother, since my father was unable to read well (I think he had what we'd call dyslexia these days). Some of those books became companions and guides.

I recall libraries in all the places where I've lived. The magnificent Wellington City Library with it's curving glass wall and matching curved shelving. The first cafe in a library in New Zealand I think. The ugly functionality, but massive size of the Auckland City Library. For a few years I had keys to the stacks of ACL as a result of my job and I would explore the catacombs. I discovered unbroken runs of Popular Electronics and built circuits based on designs from them. There was a complete set of Max Müller's Sacred Books of the East series gathering dust in a gloomy corner. Libraries in Taupo, Hamilton, Northcote, and Glenfield too. School libraries, university libraries (Waikato, Auckland, Victoria, AUT, Unitec), and private libraries too. I owned very few books until I was in my late 20s. Books were expensive and anyway, Libraries made owning them unnecessary. I spent my money on buying records. Then I discovered second-hand books and the Hard to Find Bookshop (but that's another story).

One of the important libraries I got to know was at Waikato University where I studied chemistry in the mid 1980s for four years. This was a large purpose-built university library on 4 floors with views overlooking the extensive grounds of the campus. Chemistry was on the fourth floor. They use Library of Congress call numbers, so science was Q and chemistry was QD. I got to know the QDs pretty well. But I did other sciences as well so the whole Q section was where I spent most of my time. However some days I would stop off at the 2nd or 3rd floor and just wander amongst the stacks. Trailing through sections on sociology or literature, marvelling at the titles of the books. Trying to imagine the scope of the knowledge that the books represented. All that knowledge! I was spell bound.

My first job in a library was at what was then the Auckland College of Education, now absorbed into the University of Auckland. I was lucky to get the job in many ways. My forays into rock 'n' roll were not paying the bills and I was bored. I'd been out of work long enough to qualify for a subsidised placement and my boss was canny enough to take advantage of that while giving the job I applied for to someone else. The staff there were all educated, urbane, friendly and talkative. They talked about literature in such a way that for the first time in my life I wanted to read it. I started on Nobel Prize winners, reading Hemingway, Steinbeck, Updike. I got into John Irving and D H Lawrence. I even read James Joyce. I've read his Ulysses, but prefer the original.

Importantly I learned about being a librarian and liked it enough to go to Victoria University in Wellington in 1991 for a post-graduate Librarianship course. In the process I did a research project using citation analysis on the New Zealand Library Journal that became my first academic publication. My main finding was that the local librarians were influenced by reading the New Zealand Library Journal. I did research in and around the Victoria University library and learned about writing essays (something I'd never done much of). I learned to type my essays on a computer. And in 1991, two years before the world-wide-web launched, I created my first hypertext document.

Most of my professional life was spent in engineering libraries. I became more of an information consultant, a specialist in database searches and document supply. My favourite thing was identifying a book for an engineer that was precisely what he needed and the only thing like it, finding it in a library in Canada, checking the online catalogue (this was 1995 so it was one of the very first online library catalogues that was web-searchable), and requesting the book be sent to us in NZ. A week later we got it. I also recognised the potential for the WWW to save libraries money (a feature of my approach to online information).

I gave up working in libraries in 2002 to come to Britain and immerse myself full-time in a Buddhist life style. But one of the first things I did was join the local public library (which is rather small and disappointing considering where it is). I got my readers card for the Cambridge University library about 2006. A Triratna Order colleague is a fellow of Trinity College and kindly wrote a recommendation. It costs very little and gives me access to all the collections, including electronic and to some extent manuscripts. The "UL" as everyone calls it was built in the 1920s. It's probably what you'd call "monumental". With a large tower over the entrance way and a forbidding exterior. The inside seems to be modelled on a monastery - with central courtyards and wings surrounding them.

The UL has the oddest filing system I've ever come across. Books are filed in order first of decreasing size (a,b, c or d); then by a broad subject based on a home grown system (Buddhism is 2:3-2:5); then by acquisition order, with a number indicating century and decade, then a running number. So all the middle-sized books on Buddhism are together at one end of the south wing, 3rd floor, but from the point of view of browsing they are randomly jumbled together: one gets Tibetan Tantra, followed by a meditation manual, a history of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, a treatise on Pureland Buddhism all next to each other.

The atmosphere inside is also monastic. Quiet industry. Scholars working behind piles of books. I feel the incessant tapping of computer keys detracts somewhat, but I might just be jealous of the wafer-thin laptops that scholars here all seem to have. Because the central spaces are courtyards and the books and study spaces are distributed around the edges of a large building, one can walk a very long way during a day at the library. Going from Buddhism, to where the Sanskrit books are, to the nearest photocopier is about 200m of walking and four levels of stairs!

The internal architecture is a weird mix of 1920s art-deco based utilitarian and at times rococo decoration with carved wooden panels. Mostly the former. It's pre-brutalism fortunately, but still quite stark in places. The sixth-floor North Front wing has nothing much going for it - a concrete bunker with books. And yet closer to the entrance way there is light and space and attention to detail, along with art exhibitions.

Here I have access to the literature of Buddhism in manuscript form, and published in many languages. The Tripiṭaka can be found in Pāḷi (three versions), Tibetan (two versions) and Chinese (only the Peking ed.) Published editions of Indian literature from the beginnings of Western engagement with it, and editions of ancient texts in Sanskrit and other Indic languages are comprehensively collected. Secondary literature is held in a separate area, but is also fairly comprehensive, despite the demise of Buddhist studies at Cambridge. Being a legal deposit library one of book published in the UK must be deposited there. I also have access to the entire range of their electronic collections of databases and article aggregators like JSTOR.

As a professional librarian I was often involved in discussions about the role of the library in the age of computers. In my last library job I managed projects that shifted our reliance from print and CD based indexes and sources to web-based products. I negotiated with, or translated for, suppliers, IT staff, senior management and Librarians. The UL makes full use of all these electronic resources. In the mean time many journals of free to read online (though let's not forget that someone pays to host them, they are not free). Google Books is becoming an increasingly useful tool for finding info in books - even books I already own. Scanned articles and books abound, though they are of dubious legality. And many scholars either maintain an online bibliography (e.g. Michael Witzel, Bhikkhu Anālayo, Richard Gombrich) or they upload their work to academia.edu (Jan Nattier, Harry Falk, Geoffrey Samuel). But despite all the wizardry I still need to visit the library from time to time. Sometimes I leave with burning eyes and running nose from the paper dust having handled some book that has mouldered on the shelf for decades. Very often what I want is in storage and must be retrieved by a library assistant (this is a consequence of the demise of Buddhist studies). But the service is efficient and seldom takes more than half an hour.

Book Inscription
To Isaline B. Horner
colleague and friend
CAF Rh D.
Nov 1937

There are not many libraries in the world that are so well funded, so comprehensive and so accessible. The UL is a place I can go to commune with the many scholars on whose shoulders I stand. And if I want to read the original Robin Dunbar article on neo-cortex size correlations with group size I can just get it off the shelf (I have done). Sometimes I come across little gems: books previously owned by I B Horner or books signed by Edward Conze or C.A.F. Rhys Davids (reminding us that Cambridge was once an important centre for Buddhist studies who's star has faded). I may not be a member of the university, but I know that I belong there. I may not be a world-class scholar with a lifetime of achievement and honours, but I am part of that milieu. My few publications are a contribution to the quest for knowledge to which the UL is both monument and cathedral.

~~oOo~~

Entertainer Bill Bailey
is a feminist, apparently.

I don't like our Prime Minister David Cameron. I don't like him personally. I can't stand his puffy face, his mannered voice, or his inflated moralising tone. I certainly don't like his politics (to the extent they are visible over and above his pandering to various right-wing interest groups). I usually refer to him as David Camoron. As hateful a public figure as I've ever known.

Last week he fell foul of the media for not capitulating to pressure from women's fashion magazine, Elle,to be photographed wearing a tee-shirt with the legend "This is what a feminist looks like". This was after Opposition leader, Ed Miliband, and coalition partner and Deputy PM, Nick Clegg, were pictured in the media wearing a version of the tee-shirt. Leaving aside that Ed and Nick are rating very badly in the polls in the lead up to a general election and are apt to do anything that might win a vote, and leaving aside the detrimental effects on women from reading magazines like Elle, a lot of men have been donning the tee-shirt and/or declaring that they are feminists. Looking at the men (mostly entertainers and politicians) wearing these tee-shirts they all seem to be famous for two things: craving attention and craving approval. Neither profession is the acme of moral rectitude or (self) respect.

The attitude seems to be that if you are for gender equality then you are a feminist. I find this peculiar. I suppose these men who declare themselves to be feminists are trying to express solidarity with women's struggle for equality and against oppression. While I also feel a sense of solidarity for women's struggles, I don't imagine that this makes me a feminist any more than loving women makes me a lesbian. This tee-shirt incident and some other cues got me thinking about my relationship to feminism.

Feminism as I Understand it.

My education in Feminism was ad hoc and informal. My mother self-identified as a feminist from my earliest memories of her (at least from the early 1970s) though I couldn't really give a coherent account of that that entailed (mostly it seemed to be about hating my father and various other men). When I moved to Auckland and started attending high-school many of my friends were women and this has continued to be true my whole life. I've always respected intelligence wherever I've found it. One of my close friends at high-school, Mary, was a much more thoughtful feminist, who became an academic and does research in Women's Studies and Sociology. We had many discussions in the 1980s and 1990s about some of the basic ideas of Sociology and Feminism. I wasn't always convinced (particularly on the subject of the gender identity nurture/nature argument), but I could see that women had been oppressed historically and that despite some gains there was still some way to go.

Some of my women friends at university in the mid-1980s were ideological Feminists who were entranced by Dale Spender and similar authors. It was from these friends ca. 1985 that I first heard the idea that "all men are rapists and that's all they are" (a quote from a character in Marilyn French's 1977 novel The Women's Room). My friends tried to argue that this was in fact true and worked through the logic with me. At the time this left me speechless. Did my friends really think of me as a rapist and only a rapist? Rape being such a heinous crime, to be lumped in with rapists because I was born male was a bit of a shock. This remains one of my strongest impressions of feminism.

After graduation and a period of drifting, I began a 15 year career as a Librarian. 90% of librarians are women. All of my bosses were women during this period. Most of the professional women I knew in that phase of my life were self-described feminists and were also reading French, Spender and other Feminists. I never had a problem working for and with women in general. I admired many of the women I worked for and with.

Some of the key figures in my intellectual development since have also been women. My first meditation teacher was a woman called Guhyaprabhā. Sue Hamilton transformed my understanding of Buddhism to the point where I am effectively a Hamiltonian. Jan Nattier is my idol as a researcher and writer. Collett Cox helped me to understand the Sarvāstivāda and the larger problems in Buddhist Doctrine. My views on evolution were profoundly influenced by reading Lynn Margulis, who was also a vocal feminist (I'm persuaded by her views on Darwinism and Victorianism). I also trained with some formidable women martial artists back in the day. The country I grew up in gave women the vote in 1896, I believe we were the first country in the world to do so. New Zealand prides itself on egalitarianism and also led the world in equality and anti-discrimination measures for women.

As a result it seems straightforward and indisputable to me that, for example, woman ought to receive equal pay for equal work; or that women ought not to be discriminated against simply for being female. I actually find the segregation of women in sports odd. Except perhaps for contact sports, where physical size is an issue, I see no reason to have separate women's leagues in most sports. It shocks me that the UK is so backward in the area of equal pay and slow (even resistant) to change. I am dismayed by the backward attitudes in places like Saudi Arabia (and their sphere of influence). In my writing, I long ago adopted the neutral third person pronoun (they, them, their) instead of the masculine pronoun when referring to people generally. None of which makes me a feminist.

My understanding of feminism is, as I say, rather ad hoc. The key feminist idea seems to be a particular reading of history. Rather like Marxists do, feminists see history as a history of struggle of one group against another. But instead of class against class, feminists see history in terms of the systematic oppression of women by men, and women's struggle for emancipation from this oppression. This has stronger aspects (e.g. all sex is rape; women have been enslaved by men) and weaker aspects (e.g. gender roles are imposed on children by society). The goals of feminists on this reading include over-throwing patriarchy and deprecating all gender specificity in society since it is inevitably used as a tool of oppression.

Men and Feminism

Clearly feminism is a big subject and there are a range of attitudes. Some feminists are quite fond of men generally and some are quite hostile. I'm sometimes shocked at how open women are in their hostility towards men in general. I grew up understanding that sexist jokes and generalisations about women were unwelcome and unhelpful. But I now regularly hear sexist jokes about men, and I myself regularly seem to be stereotyped as "stupid", "inarticulate" or "unemotional". I've lost count of the times that women have said to my face "I hate men". According to some feminists men are responsible for "raping" the planet too. When I speak up, as I usually do these days, the accusation is usually hastily qualified "of course I don't mean you". I am a man. If you hate men, you hate me. And discrimination on the basis of sex is just sexism. I was briefly trolled by some women on Twitter this year for a comment I made on entitlement, and told that my hat (a black felt trilby) indicated hatred towards women.

As I understand it, the feminist position is that I am, as a man, by nature of my birth, complicit in the systematic oppression of women through all time. This outlook has a number of corollaries. As a man of English descent (in Britain I'm referred to as "white") I am complicit in historic and present-day slavery and all the oppression due to Imperialism and Colonialism through the ages (I should say that I abhor the use of "white" and "black" as racial or ethnic terms, but in the UK they are standard and it's hard to avoid them here). As an educated man, and despite my solidly working class roots, I am complicit in the oppression of poor, uneducated people. I am supposed to have had all the advantages denied to women and to live a privileged life. I wish. My chief blessing in life seems to be having a good memory and curiosity, but I grew up in the cultural and intellectual desert of a working class family, on the edge of a small town in New Zealand, amidst a community deeply affected by alcohol & drug addiction, violence, and the worst downsides of colonialism. My life history includes far too many instances of being abused, assaulted, and bullied by both males and females. I've been left with life-long mental health problems and now chronic physical health problems. But apparently all that matters is that I am "white" and male. A "stupid fucking white man."

It seems to me that men who declare "I am a Feminist" are confessing that they feel complicit in the oppression of women. I never have felt complicit in that oppression, nor felt any sense of commonality with oppressors. To the best of my ability I have never been complicit in oppressing anyone (though I'm not perfect by any means). Indeed I have been oppressed and continue to feel oppressed by society.

The very labels are divisive. As though all women have more in common with each other than they do with any man and vice versa and are united in this opposition. Or that all white people are the same. I just don't get this level of pigeon-holing. For example I feel I have far more in common with women friends and family than with male strangers. Or with women who suffer mental health problems than with neuro-typical men. Or with women members of the Triratna Order compared with men who are not members of the Order. Or with just about anyone in the street compared with politicians in Westminster or the CEO of a major bank.

The idea of men as no more than beasts is expressed in the myth of Beauty and the Beast. Marie-Louise von Franz (The Interpretation of Fairy Tales) has referred to this story in particular (along with Cinderella) as representative of female individuation myths. In von Franz's Jungian perspective, the story tells us that a woman relates to her inner masculine sub-personality (animus) as a beast to be tamed. This process of taming and transforming the energy associated with the experience of animus is what the Beauty and the Beast story illustrates. It is also the plot of every single Mills & Boon romance. However most flesh and blood men are not beasts, nor can we be turned into Prince Charming through domestication. We are a mix. Some of us can be beastly (often because we have been brutalised in growing up), but some of us are angelic, and most of us are somewhere in between. War and art seem to define our edges: Hitler and Bach. None of us are helped by projected psychological dramas. Taming one's inner masculine is a very different thing from relating to a man. The same is absolutely true in reverse. Men are sometimes helplessly caught up in projections of their own inner feminine onto women. With disastrous effect on their relationships with women.

Raising Men.

As for virtually all mammals, evolution has left human males (on average) with a larger body size, physically stronger than most females, and more aggressive. This is only because female mammals typically select larger more aggressive mates. Larger more aggressive mates are more effective protectors of foraging territory and the community. Though there are always trade-offs for this form of specialisation. A community must work hard to integrate, larger more aggressive members (primates mainly do this by grooming). Our communities are less and less willing to work in this way and more likely to demonize aggression ("all men are rapists"). With no external focus aggression can turn inwards on the community. We see this and/or pointless wars everywhere. But humans add an extra twist. Often the most powerful people are not the largest or most aggressive, but the most persuasive. Those who can persuade others to do their bidding, can and dominate societies. After all Julius Caesar & Napoleon were notoriously short of stature. Politicians are professional persuaders these days and not much else. If this is domination by persuaders is oppressive, it is almost always oppressive for the majority of men as well as women. This is the 1% lording it over the 99%. In my view this is a far more productive critique of history than one which posits the mere domination of women by men. Women have been (and still are) oppressed by men, but this occurs within a larger context. The emancipation of women stands alongside the need for the emancipation of people of colour, for example. Discrimination per se is a much larger topic than discrimination against women. Special interest groups are always needed in these circumstances to highlight particular issues, but special interest groups cannot be allowed to define the issues.

Though the media often focus on crimes against women as a group, men are far more likely to be murdered or to be victims of violent crime. (ONS) We rightly feel a sense of repugnance for sex crimes, but for example in the UK 68% of murder victims were male, which means that men are more than twice as likely to be murdered as women are. We need to ask why the media don't play on this statistic the way they currently play on crimes against women or children. Men of colour are, almost everywhere in the Western world, the victims of institutionalised racism from the police. They are stopped, searched, and arrested far more often, and given harsher sentences than pale skinned men. Men make up the bulk of the spiralling prison population and a majority of the men in prison have mental health and/or drug problems, and/or come from backgrounds of abuse and homelessness (US Justice Dept). A disproportionate number are men of colour. Men in prison are typically already brutalised when they get there, but certainly brutalised by the time they get out. When we look at the situation with regards crime and say "men are beasts" we are ignoring the degradation that is required to bring men down to that level and blaming the victims.

Like most men of my generation, I was largely raised by my mother and educated by female primary school teachers. I was raised to moderate how I used my strength with women even when it seemed unfair, as it often did in my neighbourhood where girls were just as likely to be the aggressors in conflict. One was not supposed to win fights with girls even when they started the fight; but one was not supposed to lose fights with other boys either. The line between bully and sissy was thin when I was a boy.

Positive male role models were few and far between. Most of the men I have known in my life have been floundering around wondering what the point of their life is. Many of the men in my family have had addiction and mental health problems. While we can all applaud the strides made by Feminists towards securing equal status in society for women, unfortunately in parallel there has been a devaluing or even a demonisation of men and a destruction of male social contexts. Male stereotypes are relentlessly negative or unobtainable, just like female stereotypes. Except, where female stereotypes are frowned on by liberals, male stereotypes are still being actively promoted.

My Dad was dyslexic. At school, he would go up to the blackboard to spell a word, get it wrong every time, and be beaten by the teacher in front of the class every time. Years of daily public beatings and humiliation, plus the tragic accidental death of his older brother in WWII, the early death of his Mum from cancer and his Dad's subsequent slide into alcoholism, the violent breakdown and breakup of his marriage, and yeah, Dad was a bit tongue tied at times, a bit emotionally repressed. He found it hard to express himself in words. Words only ever betrayed him. Though if one only paid attention to what he did with his hands he was a marvel (he kept his vintage 1928 Austin 12/4 in working order and did the most beautiful brick-work I've ever seen). There was little or no understanding or help available to my Dad. He was just expected to man-up and soldier on from an early age (to "harden up" as my older brother and his wife say to their son). And that, as much as anything, destroyed my Dad.

When I think about the ways in which feminists I know characterise men, and the relations of men and women, they simply don't seem to apply to my own life. They are too simplistic and blunt to be useful to me as a way of understanding myself better.

The Problem

If anything I think men and women need to work together to create a better world. If any part of our society has a problem we all have a problem. At present its clear that the main problem in the world is that we are dominated by a hegemonic group of hyper-persuasive men and women, the 1%, who are parasitising the rest of society: the new, neolibertarian aristocracy. They have more or less captured government and public opinion in most countries, if not directly, then through powerful lobby groups with huge resources and through ownership of the mass media. They take far more than they need, offer as little as possible in return, and use their wealth to try to insulate themselves from the day-to-day realities of human life as far as possible. Nothing much new about the set up, except the mechanisms they currently use, especially their ability to persuade followers, are far more efficient than ever before. They resist liberalism, resist moves towards equality, and resist anything which threatens their hegemony. Step over the threshold of any major corporation and you leave liberalism and democracy behind. Corporations are feudal fiefdoms, where the only stakeholders who count are shareholders looking for short-term profits. If it is 1% who are promoting inequality and oppression, then a polarised, gender based approach to the problem, which blames all men, simply cannot help. The average man (as ever) is just a pawn in a much larger game.

Oppression is evil, but it is something that affects us all. There is an active force oppressing us all and we need to stand together against it. I don't see feminism as a unifying force or a rallying cry. It doesn't even appeal to all women, and it offers little for men, except a limited popularity with some women. When the voice of feminism appears to be a women's fashion magazine you know that something is deeply wrong. Feminism has certainly benefited women in the West and I do not mean to denigrate or dismiss feminism or feminists. But I don't think feminism is broad enough in its outlook to tackle the problems we face today or that the feminist view of history is productive of solutions for the broader problems of inequality and the capture of wealth and power by the modern day aristocrats. For example, what is the feminist response to climate change? Even if you removed all men from the equation, the women of the 1% would carry on regardless, because their values are not shared with feminists. We need to claw power back through laws that ensure good citizenship on the part of business. That power ought to go equally to men and women.

So for all these reasons (and others) I'm not a feminist. No one's asking, but I wouldn't wear the Elle tee-shirt (I would not want to be associated with a fashion magazine for any reason). I might wear a tee-shirt that said "this is what the 99% look like", but on the whole I try not to use my clothing as an ideological platform. The statement I prefer to make is that nobody owns me or can buy my opinion. If anything my cause is the cause of sober reflection on what is really happening and a refusal to just go along with the crowd.

~~oOo~~

Update (8-11-14): I didn't go looking for this, it was retweeted by William Gibson: Myla Dalbesio on Her New Calvin Klein Campaign and the 'Trend' of Plus Size Modeling. In this interview in Elle magazine, model Dalbesio, who is a very skinny young woman says:
“It’s kind of confusing because I’m a bigger girl,” Dalbesio says. “I’m not the biggest girl on the market but I’m definitely bigger than all the girls [Calvin Klein] has ever worked with, so that is really intimidating.”
It's views like this, and the accompanying photographs that lead to Body Dismorphic Disorder in young women. Elle's connection with feminism would seem to be rather tenuous, more so that of male politicians and entertainers.

One of the features of Buddhist rebirth beliefs under the microscope, is a great deal of disagreement and dissent between various Buddhist schools of thought and even internally to each school. This disagreement is seldom given sufficient attention. There is no single agreed account of rebirth or karma and I've already used this blog to highlight a number of disputes that in some cases are unresolved after more than 2000 years. In this essay I want to return to the subject of the antarābhava or interim state. I previously tackled in The Antarābhava or Interim State as a Vitalist Concept (11 July 2014) which critiqued the views of Sujato and Piya Tan. In this essay I will note some findings from an article by Qian Lin (2011) and another by Robert Kritzer (2000).

Lin points out that many of the traditional arguments for or against the existence of the antarābhava rely on lists of people who are called anāgāmin. Since this did play a central role in Piya Tan's apologetic for antarābhava and I glossed over it in my previous essay I will go into it in a lot more detail here. Lin surveys the relevant literature in Pali, Sanskrit, Gandhari, and Chinese and summarises the various lists of types of anāgāmin,giving information about the sectarian affiliations of the lists and discussing the discrepancies. He points out that even under close scrutiny, the history of the idea of antarābhava is unclear. We cannot tell which version of the antarābhava (or even no antarābhava) came first. I will make a comment on this at the end of this essay.

The word anāgāmin means "one who does not come [back]" (from ā√gam 'come') and is usually translated as "non-returner". In early Buddhist texts there are four types of noble disciples (P ariyapuggala): stream-entrants (P. sotāpanna), once-returners (sakadāgamin), non-returners (anāgāmin) and arahants. The various types are defined by which of the 10 fetters they have broken or weakened; and by how many rebirths they have yet to suffer in the kāmadhātu or sphere of sensual desire. The anāgāmin, having broken all of the five lower fetters, attains nibbāna without further rebirth in the kāmadhātu (hence they do not 'come back').

One thing to be aware of here is the Buddhist habit of working out permutations. If we have the unawakened and the awakened, the Buddhist exegetes had a penchant for listing all the possible states and treating each as if it were a real category. Another example is the paccekabuddha. It's unlikely that this category of awakened who did not teach has any basis in history (though compare Vinay Gupta), but if one is working through the possibilities, then this is one situation that can hypothetically exist. In all likelihood the anāgāmin is merely hypothetical (indeed the category is impossible to test). Thus although a lot of ink has been spilt over the interim realm based on the interpretation of this category, whatever the conclusion is, it has to be taken with a grain of salt. The discussion only makes sense within the religious parameters of Buddhism, and only follows the internal logic of Buddhism. It tells us nothing whatever about the world. That said, my task is to essay the various forms of afterlife believe held by Buddhists, so clarifying this aspect of Buddhist belief is important for a complete history of the idea.

To complicate matters there are canonical and post-canonical lists of subtypes of anāgāmin which vary in unpredictable ways: for example they may have the same list items but in a different order, and some philological problems remain with the texts, so that some terms are unclear in meaning. In these lists there are five sub-types of anāgāmin, of which one called antarāparinirvāyin which must mean something like "one who is liberated in-between". In other languages:

Pāli antarāparinibbāyin
Gāndhāri aṃtarapariṇivaï
Chinese 中般涅槃

Texts grouped by list type with school affiliation
(see Lin p.165)

The crux of the subsequent argument rests precisely on the question, "Between what?" The situation becomes more complicated as even the subtypes are sub-divided so that there are three kinds of antarāparinirvāyin. There are various approaches to explaining a total of seven sub-types of anāgāmin and there are three different lists of seven (the texts the different lists appear in along with their sectarian affiliation are represented in the table, right). The most prominent is the Pali Purisagati (Destination of Men) Sutta (AN 7.55; iv.70-4). This describes each type in terms of their practice, their level of realisation and uses a simile to illustrate the differences. Of the various lists all have the antarāparinirvāyin as the first member, but they are spread over a number of texts related to a range of different schools.

The Case Against Antarābhava

Lin surveys two main interpretations of the lists of anāgāmin types. The first occurs in the Aṅguttara Nikāya and the Chinese Madhyāgama and utilises the Iron Bowl Simile. In this simile an iron bowl (ayokapāle) is heated all day and struck with a hammer (Lin may have based his discussion on the Chinese counterpart in the Madhyāgama, as he discusses the simile in terms of an iron "slab": 159-60). The fate of the anāgāmin is likened to a chip or spark which flies off. For the sake of brevity, we'll stick to the similes for the antarāparinirvāyin anāgāmin. Struck by the hammer the chip...

arises and is extinguished (nibbattitvā nibbāyeyya)
arises, flies up, and is extinguished (nibbattitvā uppatitvā nibbāyeyya)
arises, flies up, strikes the floor, and is extinguished (nibbattitvā uppatitvā anupahacca talaṃ nibbāyeyya).

The traditional Theravāda interpretation of the antarāparinirvāyin anāgāmin found in the Puggalapaññatti is that the practitioner is reborn as a deva in the rūpadhātu and achieves liberation there before mid-life. This is consistent with the Theravāda view outlined above. "In-between" here is literally taken to mean the mid-point of life (in the rūpadhātu) i.e. between deaths. The 舍利億䰓誾曇論 = *Śāriptrābhidharma (T 1548) associated with the Dharmaguptaka Sect has a similar interpretation. Note that here that nibbattitvā is from nir√vṛt and nibbāyeyya is from nir√vā, and thus despite superficial similarities (rv> bb in Pali) the two words are not etymologically related.

Theravāda exegesis, particularly the Abhidhamma text, Kathāvatthu, explicitly denies the possibility of an antarābhava (Kv 361-5; Aung & Rhys Davids 1960: 212-213). A major problem with antarābhava from the Theravāda point of view is that the word is not found in the suttas. The whole idea of an antarābhava is in conflict with models such as the khandhas and the possible destinations for rebirth (gati). It is never mentioned as a gati. There is also the huge problem of continuity. For the Theravādin Ābhidhammikas the continuity of the viññānasota or stream of consciousness can only be maintained if rebirth is instantaneous: the last moment of consciousness in the dying person (cuticitta) must be the direct condition for the arising of the first moment of consciousness (paṭisandhicitta) in the new person. The more so because the cuticitta and the paṭisandhicitta have the same object (ālambana), as does any subsequent moment of bhavaṅgacitta (resting-state mental activity). If this series is interrupted the whole Theravāda model of how karma produces rebirth, including their solution to Action at a Temporal Distance, breaks down. So, historically, Theravādins reject the antarābhava on both scriptural and logical grounds.

Even so, in practice many modern day Theravādins accept the existence of an antarābhava, as noted in my previous essay. Lin cites the study by Rita Langer (2007: 82-84) which records that in Sri Lanka most lay people and many bhikkhus, against Theravāda orthodoxy, believe in an antarābhava. This ties in with local folk beliefs about the afterlife. Prolific translator Bodhi also seems to accept the idea of an antarābhava in his Aṅguttara Nikāya translation (see 2012: 1782 n.1536). Blogger and writer, Sujato also seems to accept it. Sujato (2010) glosses the Theravāda arguments against antarābhava and concludes:

"These arguments sound suspiciously post hoc. The real reason for the opposition to the in-between state would seem rather that it sounds suspiciously like an animist or Self theory."

While he is correct to be suspicious of vitalist or animist theories, he does not consider impact of discontinuity between beings on viññānasota (i.e. the destruction of the whole mechanism for karma carefully worked out by the Theravāda Ābhidhammikas). For Sujato the clinching argument comes from a single reference in the Kutuhalasāla Sutta (SN 44.9)

‘And further, master Gotama, when a being has laid down this body, but has not yet been reborn in another body, what does the master Gotama declare to be the fuel?’

‘Vaccha, when a being has laid down this body, but has not yet been reborn in another body, it is fuelled by craving, I say. For, Vaccha, at that time, craving is the fuel.’ [Sujato's translation]

His note shows that at least one of the Chinese counterparts to this text does not imply any gap. They also show that this passage is overlooked by the Kathāvatthu discussion. The question, then, is did this text even exist at that time? Sujato concludes that:

"the Buddha, following ideas current in his time – for Vacchagotta was a non-Buddhist wanderer (paribbājaka) – accepted that there was some kind of interval between one life and the next."

Apart from general caveats about what the Buddha might or might not have believed being entirely obscured by history, we must concede that this sutta is phrased in such a way as to allow for the idea that the author might have accepted a gap between death and rebirth. However note that Buddhaghosa glosses this by saying it refers to the moment (khaṇa) when between death (cuti) and arising of the paṭisandhicitta (SNA 3.114), i.e. Buddhaghosa is concerned to preserve the integrity of the viññāṇasota.

The context here resists the interpretation of antarābhava. Vacchagotta is involved in speculation about where famous people have been reborn or even if they have been reborn at all. The question raised is about rebirth generally, about how rebirth can occur at all. Vacchagotta's doubt is specifically related to not being reborn, he is perplexed about how someone is not reborn. In the metaphor "Fire burns with fuel, not without fuel" (aggi saupādāno jalati, no anupādāno). The metaphorical distance between one fire and the next is spatial not temporal. In answer to the question, what causes fire to spread across space and ignite new fires, the answer is wind (vāto), the archetype of physical movement. The wind element causes fires to spread. To then read the question about rebirth in temporal terms, as explaining a time gap between bodies (kāya) is to misunderstand the metaphor. The question, really, is about what drives a person (satta) from body to body (note the metaphysics of the question are still not orthodox Buddhism).

On the other hand it is de rigueur for Buddhists to allow the beliefs of their interlocutors to stand in an argument without disputing them, but to turn the conversation away from the content of beliefs towards practice. Thus when in the Tevijja Sutta the Buddha declares to the two Brahmin students that, unlike their own teachers, he definitely does know Brahmā, Brahmā's world and the way to Brahmā's world, we need not take the author literally. He is using the language of the theistic Brahmins without contention because his purpose is not to dispute metaphysics, but to direct attention to experience. Now, when the author of the Kutuhalasāla Sutta puts these words in Gotama's mouth he does not waste time having Gotama refute the metaphysics of rebirth, but simply gives the standard answer as to the condition for all kinds of rebirth: if one has any kind of existence the primary condition for that is craving. It's not, as Sujato seems to imply, that craving (taṇha) is a special kind of fuel (upādāna) for existence in the antarābhava. Craving is what keeps the rounds of rebirth turning. Taṇha is always the upādāna for bhava.

So if we see the Buddha answering a general question about rebirth in terms of an otherwise absent idea of antarābhava it really doesn't make sense. We cannot from such obscure and difficult passages claim to know the mind of the Buddha. In terms of Theravāda metaphysics, another kind of being in a previously unmentioned interim state is a philosophical disaster: the whole Abhidhamma model of karma collapses (which effectively means that Theravāda Buddhism collapses because answers to so many other questions ride on the model of karma). This means that even if some Theravādins believe in an antarābhava they are left with the task of reconstructing the whole of Theravāda metaphysics to account for it. In the process they abandon Buddhaghosa. Though we can see that antarābhava is attractive, it's clear that the implications of the belief have not been thought through.

The Case for Antarābhava

The literature which argues the case for the antarābhava is more extensive than the contrary. Lin highlights the Saṅgītiparyāya as containing an important argument in favour of antarābhava. This text (T 1536) is a Sarvāstivāda commentary on the Saṅgītisūtra (= P Saṅgīti Sutta DN ) included in their Abhidharma. In this reading the antarāparinirvāyin dies in the kāmadhātu, arises in the antarābhava and attains nibbāna before being reborn in the rūpadhātu. Other types of anāgāmin are reborn in the rūpadhātu and attain nibbāna from there, slowly or quickly. This pattern is also followed in the Vibhāṣā and the *Saṃyuktābhidharmahṛdaya. The Abhidharmakośa mostly agrees and confirms the reading of antarāparinirvāyin.

Like the Theravādins, the Sarvāstivādin Ābhidharmikas had been developing Buddhist doctrine in order to solve problems in the received teachings, particularly the problem of Continuity and the problem of Action at a Temporal Distance (See Sarvāstivāda Approach to the Problem of Action at a Temporal Distance). As a result of the solution they adopted, the Sarvāstivādins ended up with the opposite problem to the Theravādins. Where the Theravādin model of continuity breaks down with an antarābhava, the Sarvāstivādins reasoned that there would be no way to maintain continuity through death without an antarābhava.

The Sāṃmitīyanikāyasśāstra (associated with the Sāṃmitīya Sect) argues that vijñāna without rūpa (i.e. a body) is not possible and that some kind of body is required to carry vijñāna from one rebirth to the next (Kritzer 2000: 241). This is significant, because wrapped up with antarābhava is the idea of the manomayakāya the so-called "mind-made body". Although neither Lin nor Kritzer mention this entity it is crucial in some accounts of the afterlife and thus at some point we will need to consider what it is and how it functions (I'll return to this idea in a forthcoming essay).

For a further detail of the Yogacāra arguments for antarābhava we can turn to Kritzer (2000). His article examined the views of Vasubandhu, especially as found in the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya (Vasubandhu's auto-commentary on the Abhidharmakośa) but also crucially the Viniścayasaṃgrahaṇi. The Bhāṣya is both the most systematic and one of the most influential accounts of the subject, as much for its portrayal of Vasubandhu's opponents as for his own views. Much of the contemporary scholarly writing on antarābhava is based on the Bhāṣya, and in many ways it has been over used as a source text on schools whose own literature is lost, fragmentary or only preserved in Chinese (especially the Sarvāstivādins). Kritzer points out that despite commonalities with the Sarvāstivāda account, the two should not be equated as he shows by examining arguments in the Vibhāṣā, one of the foundation texts of the Sarvāstivāda.

I want to write a separate summary of Kritzer (2000), since it will be quite long, but for now will try to give a flavour of the arguments. The crux seems to be a development of the idea vijñāna supported by rūpa mentioned above. Vasubandhu returns to an agricultural metaphor for the life-cycle of humans comparing us to rice plants (cf. comments on the fivefold-niyāma in Experience and Free Will in Early Buddhism). Vasubandhu's interpreters have read this different ways, but what he seems to be getting at is that the rice seed provides continuity between rice plants. What we do not see is one rice plant becoming another rice plant with no interval. Vasubandhu imagines that humans produce "seeds" when they die (though here he seems not to be referring to the karmic seeds stored in the ālayavijñāna). These seeds provide us with an interim body of a sort that sustains vijñāna until it can connect with rūpa again in rebirth (it's here that the idea of a mind-made body is both relevant and paradoxical because it suggests that a manokayakāya is the manas playing the role of rūpa in order to be a condition for the arising of vijñāna - i.e. it involves circularity that is disallowed by other doctrines of how conditionality works). The Viniścayasaṃgrahaṇi contains a series of questions and answers including this one:

Question: how does one know that there is an intermediate existence? Answer: because [when a being] dies here, there is no way for his citta and caittas to go without support to another place. It is not like an echo because [an echo] is merely an illusion. It is not like a reflected image because that [object] does not perish. And it is not like grasping an object because there is no movement [of consciousness in the case of perception]. Because these similes are inappropriate, the intermediate existence must be understood to exist. Thus, one must contemplate the arising of rūpaskandha in accordance with this”. (Kritzer 247)

This ties in with another image related to rice. Vasubandhu uses the example of a load of rice being transported from one village to another. It does not simply disappear from one village and appear in another, but goes on a journey through a series of stages. In other words Vasubandhu is, unlike many of his predecessors, thinking explicitly and abstractly about causation. Change or movement, as Vasubandhu observes it, is not instantaneous but gradual and thus rebirth cannot be instantaneous either. This may well hark back to Nāgārjuna's abstruse discussions of change in the first chapter of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā.

Sujato may well argue here that this metaphor is analogous to the fire metaphor in the Kutuhalasāla Sutta: that the transportation through space is the root metaphor for rebirth, and that as transit through space is not instantaneous then rebirth cannot be instantaneous. Something must effect the transit between bodies. In response we might question whether reifying the metaphor is helpful. Is the transmission of certain crucial (moral) information about the actions of the previous life onto the next life so as to determine the realm and circumstances of rebirth simply a physical process, like spreading fire or transporting rice grain? Or does the metaphor allow for differences? For advocates of substance dualism the mind is clearly a different stuff to the body and cannot be subject to physical laws or it would not work. One of the features of ESP, a feature of many Buddhist discourse, is that it works with no regard for physical distance: in clairvoyance for example, one knows the thoughts of others as they think them. For advocates of substance monism the idea of an afterlife is so unlikely that it is hardly worth thinking about, but presumably a substance monist would insist that information transfer must take an appreciable time: like downloading a file from the internet. However, no Buddhist metaphysics excludes miracles, magic or ESP.

Vasubandhu is clearly trying to avoid the charge of eternalism by making the antarābhava analogous to other states of being: vijñāna arises in dependence on the manifestation of rūpaskandha in the antarābhava. The scriptural argument against this is simple and was stated in the Kathāvatthu more than 2000 years ago: if there is a an interim state of being, then why is it not included in traditional lists of such states? If there is rūpa then this is (effectively) a rebirth. Why is it not listed as a rebirth destination (gati)?

Vasubandhu's main argument is similar in form to Xeno's paradox. The counter argument is that if some interim state between rebirths (even transition from kāmadhātu to the rūpadhātu) is definitely required, then the same argument holds for the transition from the kāmadhātu to the antarābhava. By Vasubandhu's reasoning we are forced to postulate an antarā-antarābhava and along with it some even more subtle form of being. And so on ab absurdum. Every transition requires an interim state between the original state and the changed state with infinite regress. So the idea of an antarābhava does not solve Vasubandhu's observed problem with causality.

Conclusion

The logic of the arguments outlined is entirely bound up with versions of the Buddhist worldview. As with all afterlife beliefs, there is no way to argue about the antarābhava from first principles. How we view the antarābhava is entirely dependent on what we stipulate at the outset. On traditional arguments, it is either required or forbidden depending on our starting assumptions about how karma and rebirth work. For religious Buddhists this has meant, essentially that religious arguments (based on scripture) carried considerable weight and that reasoned arguments were always constrained by religious arguments.

And thus it is all the more curious that contemporary religious figures such as Theravāda bhikkhus and scriptural commentators reject the religious arguments of their own tradition and adopt the antarābhava, even though it invalidates their own model of karma and rebirth. Such doctrinal conflicts have clearly never bothered the religious lay people very much. Lay Buddhism has always been a religion of faith and propitiation rather than intellect and theology.

My earlier essay pointed out some of the philosophical problems that the antarābhava entails: it seems to involve a form of eternalism. This is something that the Continuity problem cannot ever avoid: either there is discontinuity or there is continuity. In the former the problem of how to transmit information karma is unsolved, in the latter the solution is inevitably eternalistic. The idea of dependent arising doesn't actually solve this dilemma, it only disguises it. There are any number of problems with using pratītyasamutpāda as a Theory of Everything. One cannot take a description of the phenomenology of mental activity presenting itself to awareness and turn that into a general metaphysics and especially not into a physics without creating problems.

So despite the fact that Theravādins settled on their explanation (until recently) and Māhāyānikas settled on Vasubandhu's explanation, in fact neither the problem of Continuity, nor the problem of Action at a Temporal Distance, were definitively solved by either party. The problems were simply shelved as original intellectual contributions dried up. In India, Buddhist exegesis became a competition with non-Buddhists traditions on matters previously considered inconsequential to the Buddhist project; while in Sri Lanka and Burma it turned into increasingly elaborate restatements of old ideas. I'm not well enough informed about Buddhism outside Indian to form definition opinions, but my impression is that the problems of assimilating Buddhism into a culture like China presented such massive problems that Buddhist theology went in entirely different directions. The Chinese seem to have deified the Buddha, whereas the Tibetans were constantly occupied with managing the massive proliferation of teachings. Modern Buddhism largely ignores discontinuities and is mainly concerned with presenting Buddhism as a transcendent truth with no visible flaws, a panacea that applied to everything, results in Utopia, emerging fully formed from a singularity we call Buddha. Could we be any further from the historical nature of our own religion?

At the outset I mentioned that it was unclear from Lin's account whether antarābhava was part of the original narrative of Buddhism or not. I now think it is clear that it is a late addition. Awareness of problems like Continuity and Action at a Temporal Distance only emerge in the post-sutta literature of the Abhidharma. Antarābhava simply doesn't occur in any early text, even when the concept of punabbhava is prominent. The single reference which seems to point to a poorly defined belief in at least a spatial distance between lives, hardly changes the picture. The fundamental disagreement about antarābhava means it can only have emerged once Buddhism had began to fragment into sects. The arguments evinced by the various sides rely on mature Abhidharma theories. The Theravādins only consider it as a reaction to the Abhidharma theories of other schools. So antarābhava was not part of the original Buddhist narrative about the afterlife. That said, the problems which led to antarābhava being proposed as a solution were in place early on.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Aung, Shwe Zan & Rhys Davids, C. A. F. (1960) The Points of Controversy: or, Subjects of discourse being a translation of the Kathāvatthu from the Abhidhammapiṭaka. Pali Text Society. First published 1915.

Bodhi. (2012) The Numerical Discourses of the Buddha. Wisdom.

Kritzer, Robert. (2000) 'Rūpa and The Antarābhava.'Journal of Indian Philosophy 28: 235–272.

Langer, Rita. (2007). Buddhist Rituals of Death and Rebirth: Contemporary Sri Lankan Practice and its origin. Routledge.

Lin, Qian. (2011) 'The antarābhava Dispute Among Abhidharma Traditions and the List of anāgāmins.'Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 34(1-2): 149–186.

Sujato (2010) Rebirth and the In-Between State in Early Buddhism. http://santifm.org/santipada/2010/rebirth-and-the-in-between-state-in-early-buddhism

generic virus image

There's nothing like having a common cold to bring out the voodoo in one's friends. As I write this I'm a week into a cold, the first for well over a year. I've had a bad sore throat, aches and pains, and now I'm starting to get swollen sinuses and excessive mucus production. Classic viral infection. It's a story that must have been playing out in humans for 10's of 1000s of years. Apparently there are over 200 variations of the viruses that cause the range of symptoms that we call "a cold". We call it a "cold" or a "chill" because historically we thought that cold damp air upset the four bodily humours, and caused the symptoms. Some people still think that being cold and damp causes colds, though this is not true.

One of the main recommended therapies, as I'm sure readers will know, is vitamin C and lots of it. Tell someone you have a cold and like a Jehovah Witness on the doorstep asking if you "know Jesus", they will ask you if you're taking Vitamin C, because "It helps me so much when I have a cold". Hallelujah!

We have Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling to thank for popularising Vitamin C. Back in 1970 he published a book called "Vitamin C and the Common Cold" which made some rather bold claims. Unfortunately the studies he based his book on have subsequently been discredited (by one of the authors of the study cited below). However he stimulated interest and since then many trials of varying have been conducted, but usually with confusing results. The way to deal with confusing results to do a review: combine all the studies done over a period and see what the averages look like. One of the largest ever reviews of research on Vitamin C was published in 2013.

Hemilä, Harri & Chalker, Elizabeth. (2013) 'Vitamin C for preventing and treating the common cold.' The Cochrane Library. DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD000980.pub4

This study showed no prophylactic effect, but some minor therapeutic effect. Excluding trials that were not randomised or double blind, the researches examined many studies with thousands of participants. They concluded:

"... regular supplementation had a modest but consistent effect in reducing the duration of common cold symptoms, which is based on 31 study comparisons with 9745 common cold episodes."

but that...

"Trials of high doses [in the order of 8000mg] of vitamin C administered therapeutically, starting after the onset of symptoms, showed no consistent effect on the duration or severity of common cold symptoms."

The regular supplement was between 200 mg and 2000 mg with the most common dose being 1000 mg. The mean reduction in the duration of the cold symptoms for adults was 7.7% (ranging between 4 and 12%). Thus if my present cold lasts 14 days (which seems to be normal for me in the UK) I could expect a reduction in the duration of my symptoms of approximately one day from taking 1000 mg of vitamin C per day. Taking doses of 8000 mg per day showed no increased benefit unless one was a marathon runner (or similar) in which case it was associated with a moderately lower the risk of infection. One day out of 14 is hardly spectacular and is certainly well under the perceived benefit that people claim to gain from taking it. Mind you the study showed considerable variation. It might be almost twice as much (almost 2 days out of 14), but it might be half as much.

Something else to keep in mind is that with 200 separate viral agents causing a wide range of symptoms there is no standardised time that a cold lasts. Two people could even be infected with the same virus, at the same time, and still have symptoms of varying duration because of factors unknown. Of course scientists use control groups and statistical analysis to try to determine what is significant, but when every case of the common cold is different it's important not to overstate the value of these studies. For a lay person, dosing themselves with store-bought vitamin C and no control group, its not really possible to make sensible deductions about the efficacy of the stuff on their illness. Most of the studies that have been conducted have in fact been inconclusive or contradictory. Many of the studies conducted in the immediate aftermath of Pauling's book found no evidence at all for therapeutic effects of vitamin C. It's only in a large review that some clarity emerges.

So if the measurable effect is roughly one day in 14 why do people absolutely swear by Vitamin C and hawk it like bible-thumping evangelists? As pointed out in my précis of work on reason by Mercier & Sperber, we humans are very poor at solo reasoning tasks. Reason is a process that seems to have evolved for small groups to make collective decisions. One person proposes as idea and presents all the evidence for it (and thus confirmation bias is a feature of reasoning, not a bug), while other group members critique the idea and/or propose alternatives. Reasoning helps lead a small group to a decision. It does not necessarily lead to the truth or the Truth, but simply helps a small group decide what actions to take. Presumably the results of previous decisions play a part in critiquing the idea, but most of us simply cannot both propose and idea and critique it at the same time. Thus it's natural to argue for a remedy like vitamin C if one believes in it and to martial all the facts at one's disposal to support the argument. It's just that people making arguments find it hard to look beyond facts that confirm there argument. And it's up the rest of the group to come up with counter arguments. When a meme like "vitamin C is good for colds" becomes popular (due to a Noble laureate describing it as a panacea) then there are few people making the counter-argument and the reasoning process simply fails to work. There is no one to play the Devil's advocate and without that a theory cannot be properly thought about, let alone tested.

There is another possibility. I don't have my copy to hand, but there is an interesting supplement in Ariel Glucklich's book The End of Magic to do with perceptions of time. While studying tantric healers in Varanasi, he also came to know some divers. These men free dived from rowing boats to find treasure on the bottom of the Ganges (I think it might have been gold from corpses, but the reason is immaterial). Asked how long they could hold their breath these men answered in all sincerity "15-20 minutes". Which is incredible! Or it would be if it were true. In fact when timed they were under for about 5 minutes, which is about the physiological limit and similar to pearl divers and others to do this for a living. So where they lying? Glucklich concluded that they were not lying, but their sense of time when underwater became distorted. The diving is in fact quite dangerous as the river has strong currents and a huge amount of debris. Diving stretches the body's physiology, but when you add danger it magnifies the effect. Subjectively the divers experienced the time as much longer than the more objective observer sitting safely on the boat with a stop-watch.

I wonder if something similar happens to the ill person? Being ill seems interminable. I for one sleep badly when I have a cold and feel wretched for days on end primarily because of this. Perhaps time perception is altered. And something which promises to reduce the time of suffering becomes subjectively inflated. I wonder if an effect like this could be measured?

Science Reporting

Part of the problem is the way such science is reported. This particular study seems to have been widely and wildly reported. The Daily Mail summed it up this way:

"Taking vitamin C DOES reduce the risk of a cold - but only if you exercise
Vitamin makes no difference to couch potatoes
But in those who work out, it can HALVE the risk of a cold and help speed up recovery, say Finnish experts
Children are more responsive to the vitamin than adults"

Remembering that the "exercise" referred to was marathon running and the associated doses of vitamin C were in the order of 8000 mg which is 10,000 times the daily requirement for the stuff in the body. The result doesn't apply to the kind of moderate exercise that most people manage. In fact they chose not to focus on the result in the way that I have, i.e. on the demonstrable (if variable) therapeutic effectiveness of vitamin C in reducing the duration of symptoms. That was a more positive story. The Mail, generally speaking, is a right-wing paper with an agenda that includes demonising the poor and unhealthy. It is famous for regularly featuring front page stories on the latest cause of cancer or cure for cancer, with a preference for the former. In the Mail's world everything is either a cause or cure of cancer. The slightest hint that a substance, or especially a food, causes cancer and it goes on the front page. So for them it's natural to see the story as a criticism of "couch potatoes" and to focus on the negative side of health stories.

Another right-wing paper that loves health science stories, The Telegraph, reported that "Britons are wasting million of pounds buying vitamin C supplements to ward off colds after researchers found they have no benefit at all." This lack of prophylactic effect is consistent with the present study, but note the contradictory message compared with our other story. The review cited above is also referred to in the Telegraph story though no link is provided to the study. On the other hand another study shows that a small zinc sulphate supplement did seem to offer some protection from colds in some children. Though if you read carefully the author of this study carefully hedges the benefits of zinc with a "possibly". Zinc possibly prevents colds. "Might" is a long way from "does". Another more thorough report on the same study (chosen at random from many) says:

"[lead researcher] Allan concedes, “I certainly don’t want to be telling parents to put their children on zinc every day to prevent the common cold. The research is not very robust.” [emphasis added]

Why does one report on this research contain the words "The research is not very robust" and one not? Clearly reported news is not objective and one has to take into account what message the editor of the publication is trying to send. In this case the Telegraph wants to tell Britons they are idiots for spending money on cold remedies. And if we want to see the original report? From yet another source we (finally) learn that "the review is published in the Jan. 27 issue of Canadian Medical Association Journal." And this enables us to identify it as:

G. Michael Allan and Bruce Arroll. 'Prevention and treatment of the common cold: making sense of the evidence.'CMAJ (published ahead of print January 27, 2014).

But this is not available for free online reading (unlike the previous study). So the average person simply hits a dead end at this point. There is no way to check what the journalist is saying, and in the case of the Telegraph the journalist has clearly mislead the reader. If you search for research on this subject the results vary so wildly that it is very confusing. How is a lay person supposed to make an informed decision? The simple answer is that we don't. We almost never do. We decide based on what we already know, what our friends and family say, and some fairly random research on Google. Most of us are not able to assess the reliability of the information. It's an invidious position to be in.

Happily the large meta-analysis is free online, and these large studies of studies are probably the best way to assess the effectiveness of any given treatment. So we can rest assured that in the case of vitamin C it's worth taking when you have a cold.

Coda

I thought of this point having more or less finished the essay above. It might have been possible to weave into the main narrative, but in a way it works as a standalone comment because it highlights something about the public perception of medicines. Notwithstanding the poor standards of science reporting in the newspapers, the studies referred to above are very careful to eliminate the placebo effect by using double blinds and randomisation, so that even those administering the treatment don't know who is being given what. The placebo effect was first noticed because it skewed results in drug trials where the participants or the doctors knew what treatment was being given. When the patient believes that they are receiving an effective treatment that treatment is more likely to be effective and/or like to be more effective than if they believe they are getting no treatment (there's some suggestion that the knowledge of the administering doctor can also have an effect). From the scientists point of view this means they can be fooled into thinking that a drug is more effective than it is (they are really only interested in the chemistry and not the psychology of drugs they hand out).

Thus although the scientists are at pains to eliminate the placebo effect to describe only the effects of the drug that are due to it's chemistry, as a member of the public looking for an effective remedy one needs to make a slightly different calculation. Of course one wants to take an effective treatment, but the placebo effect means that a large factor in the effectiveness is that one believes the treatment is effective. In other words we have this equation:

Vitamin C + credulity with respect to vitamin C are (on average) more effective than vitamin C alone.

Of course no one measures this extra effectiveness, because the scientific credibility of drugs rests on their their chemical effects. But where it has been measured, the placebo effect is really quite a significant factor in health treatments.

Lay people might like to think of placebo as the credulity bonus. Doctors of course are supposed to be forbidden by moral codes from over-stating the effectiveness of drugs, despite the fact that many drugs -- like antibiotics and antidepressants -- are routinely over-prescribed. It would certainly be less harmful to prescribe vitamin C for colds than it is prescribing antibiotics. The excess vitamin C over the ~40mg or so recommended by the NHS is just excreted in urine and there are few side-effects even at relatively high doses.

~~oOo~~

next week it's back to limbo.

In considering the Buddhist afterlife one of the more obscure terms, amidst a plethora of obscure terms, is manomaya kāya or 'mind-made body'. In the book of her PhD dissertation, Sue Hamilton (1996) explains that manomaya is one of the most obscure terms in the Pali Canon (138). This partly because of intrinsic ambiguity and partly because the word is used ambiguously. Also, Non-Theravāda Ābhidharmika Buddhists employed the word in a quite different metaphysical framework. This first of three essays on manomaya kāya will examine the Vedic and Pali uses of the term manomaya as a prerequisite to trying to understand the subsequent use manomaya kāya in the context of the Buddhist afterlife. I'll use the framework employed by Hamilton, though I won't always use her exact analysis.

PED tells us that the word maya is an adjective meaning 'made of' or 'consisting of' or 'originating in' (probably from √mā'measure'). Thus the sense is similar to the metaphorical idiom "the measure of a man" in which we comment on "what a man is made of". It's related to the word māyā, which means 'to make, or create' (and later 'to make appear, illusion', 'to deceive'). The form maya is only used in Pali as the second member of a compound in the form x-maya where it generally means 'made of x' or 'consisting of x', though for example we'd translate aggimaya simply as 'fiery' (i.e. made of fire); sovaṇṇamaya 'golden'; dhūmamaya'smokey' and so on.

Manas is also a polysemic word. It can mean virtually any phenomena that comes under the heading 'mental', from an individual thought, to the internal faculty of registering mental activity, to the entire apparatus of cognition, or mental activity generally. In some texts it even appears to substitute for hadaya. In Pali it is frequently used synonymously with, and indistinguishably from, citta, viññāṇa, and sometimes saññā; but later takes on the more fixed reference as the mental sense faculty (counterpart to the physical senses). As with all too many Buddhist technical terms, understanding any particular occurrence of manas in a text requires attention to the context.

Grammar Note: Textual Pali is uncomfortable with nouns ending in consonants that it inherits from earlier phases of the language. Thus the declensions of the word manas are a little confused. It's common to cite the word in the nominative singular, mano, as though it is an -a noun; and to see -a forms such as manena (instrumental singular). However it retains forms such as manaso, manasā and manasi (genitive, instrumental and locative singular) that reflect the form manas. Both forms of the instrumental singular occur, but manasā is more common in the suttas and manena in the later literature. Similarly for the genitive singular manaso/manassa. This suggests that as time went on Pali users saw manas more and more as mana.

We must be quite careful not to project modern ideas about the mind backwards in time and attribute them to the ancient Buddhists. Mind was not a function of the brain, but more likely of the heart (which we now know to be a slab of muscle for pumping blood). No distinction was made between thoughts and emotions (both were lumped into the category citta), but instead experience was understood as having physical (kāyika) and mental (cetasika) aspects depending on how they were presented to awareness, i.e. whether awareness arose in dependence on the five physical senses or the manas. Mind or consciousness was not a theatre of, or a container for, experience (see The 'Mind as Container' Metaphor). There was no resting-state consciousness waiting for sensory input, but instead we become aware of something when sense object and sense organ overlap and create the conditions for mental activity to arise (if any aspect of this set up is waiting for stimulus it is the organ itself, which is conceived of as being literally struck by sense impressions). The implication being that when there is no input, or, as in deep sleep, no viññāna to process the input, then we are not aware. Most importantly the ancient Buddhists focussed exclusively on cognition as a process rather than the mind as an entity. Where we are tempted to translate a Pali word as 'the mind', we'll find that 'mental activity' is almost always a better choice in the sense of more accurately conveying the understanding of the authors. There is no sense of having an organ 'the mind', which does the activity of thinking (as we conceptualise it now). 'The mind' precisely is the activity of thinking. Lastly as far as we can make out from their literature, the early Buddhists were not mind-body dualists, which is to say that, though they could make a distinction between mental and physical cognitions, they did not suppose the mind and body to be made of different stuff. To the extent they thought about ontology (which was seldom if ever) they seem to consider that phenomena were all of one kind no matter to which sense organ they presented themselves.

In other words, many if not most, of the fundamental metaphors we use for thinking about the mind would not have made sense to early Buddhists. They would not recognise our conception of the mind or consciousness. And this means that we struggle to see the mind from their point of view also.

According to Hamilton, the compound mano-maya can be analysed in at least three different ways:

made of mental activity.
made by mental activity,
made in mental activity; originating in mental activity.

That is, we can read mano as being in genitive (manaso mayaṃ), instrumental (manasā mayaṃ) or locative (manasi mayaṃ) case respectively. The dative case clearly doesn't apply. I'd add the ablative case: made from mental activity (manasā mayaṃ). Options 2. and 3b. amount to much the same thing, but option 3a. is very unlikely because Pali seemingly lacks the metaphor THE MIND IS CONTAINER. As we will see in the next essay the manomaya kāya qua body is made from this body (kāyā in the ablative case) [by mental activity]. Thus the ablative case not applicable.

There is a contrast between 1. and 2. The ontological implications are quite distinct. If something is made of mental activity then that suggests that mental activity is a kind of stuff something can be made of. The implication is that this is a different stuff than the body is made of (especially in the context of manomaya kāya). On the other hand if something is made by, or made in, mental activity, then it does not imply a separate stuff. Hamilton emphasises that in schemes like the khandhas, the interest is not in what a human is, in terms of substances, but in only in terms of the structure of human experience. And even the elements (mahābhūta) from which we are made are defined experientially (e.g. earth is characterised by resistance, colour, etc). In the Aṅguttara Nikāya commentary we find this gloss of manomaya: manena nibbattitaṃ "constructed by the mind" (Manorathapūraṇiyā 1.209) indicating that Buddhaghosa also understood the instrumental to apply. This means that we expect manomaya to mean "made by mental activity". Now we must look more closely at how it is used in practice to see if this is correct.

Hamilton tackles the term in four contexts:

Dhammapada 1 & 2.
A single case of manomaya referring to manodhātu.
As a synonym for the cosmological rūpadhātu, in which there is no ontological discontinuity between the body (rūpa) and the mind (arūpa).
The idea of a manomaya kāya in meditation.

For the purposes of studying the Buddhist afterlife, it is the last two the mainly concern us, while and 4. will form part of a subsequent essay on manomaya kāya. However we need to establish the parameters of what is meant by manomaya.

1. In the case of Dhammapada my analysis, based as it is on Hamilton's second book (2000), is close in spirit to the analysis found in her first book (1996). The conclusion is that manomayā dhammā means that experiences are made by mental activity, or, in other words reliant on mental processes. Dhammas are mind-y or mind-ish. This is not Idealism because experiences are also reliant on sense objects, which do not depend on mental activity. The emphasis on mental activity is methodological, because freedom from automatic responses to sense objects comes from a disciplined mind. Hence mental activity takes precedence (mano pubbaṅgamā). The contrast is explicitly between manas and dhammā. We might see this as a contrast between sense faculty (indriya) and sense objects (ālambanā), but the focus of the first lines of both Dhp 1 & 2 seems to be on mental activity generally and experiences generally. The other two padas however, are not about having experiences, but about acting on them. Mano precedes dhammās, but it is the state of mind in which one acts that determine whether we subsequently experience sukha or dukkha (see also AN i.11). Hamilton argues that to translate manas as "mind" here is a mistake of reification. The sense is more like "thinking" as an action rather than mind an entity; or thinking that sets actions in motion.

2. In the case of manomaya related to manodhātu Hamilton cites a verse from SN iv.71 (SN 35:94):

Papañca-saññā itarītarā narā,
Papañca-yantā upayanti saññino;
Mano-mayaṃ geha-sitañca sabbaṃ,
Panujja nekkhamma-sitaṃ irīyati.

Men with any perceptions of proliferation,
Approach the workings of proliferation connected with perception;
And dispelling everything mind-made connected with home;
They proceed to a life of renunciation.

Hamilton sees this as referring to "the fact that all saṃsāric phenomena are processed by the manodhātu" (143). That is, experience is conditioned by (maya) the mind (manas). My reading of pada b and my translation are somewhat different from Hamilton (and from Bodhi). I read papañca-yantā as "the workings or mechanisms (yanta) of proliferation (papañca)." In other words the verse suggests that once one begins to realise just how reactive mental activity is, one starts to lose interest in worldly things and wants more and more to follow up the insights, and this naturally leads to a renunciate lifestyle. Mano-maya is explicitly related "the home" (geha) as a metonym for all that is connected with ordinary daily life (with all its attachments). In other words here mental activity is responsible for proliferation and thus suffering.

This point warrants a brief digression. Experience is never"direct", despite the claims of some Buddhists. Experience is always a construct (e.g. of indriya, ālambana, and vijñāna); always mediated by mental activity; and only some aspects of experience are ever presented to awareness. Even in what we think of as integrated states such as jhāna, we stop experiencing the mundane sensual sensation (stop hearing the sounds around, stop experiencing our body) and become absorbed in the sensations associated with the object of meditation. What we are aware of is always partial, and always mediated by manas. Hamilton points out (143) that all experience, including experiences like insight, involves manas: "manodhātu is the door through which saṃsāra is subjectively experienced." And this is the reason experience is termed manomaya.

3.1The Vedic Background

In order to establish a basis for relation between manomaya and the cosmological rūpadhātu (as distinct from the sensory experience of rūpa), Hamilton surveys various Vedic references to the power of the mind. For example in Ṛgveda X.129.4 desire is the first seed of mental activity. "The power of the mind originates in the process of thinking, or willing" (144). However, even in similar Upaniṣadic expressions the context is still ritual rather than ethical. "Desire" means the intense concentration of the sacrificer on the desired object of the sacrifice (very often a good afterlife). However, more of the power of the mind is associated with knowing: "Knowledge of a thing gives power over it, and the importance of knowledge underlies the sacrificial rationale: it is knowledge which gives the ritual actions their power" (145).

The word manomaya itself occurs only once in Ṛgveda at RV 10.85.12 which describes the marriage of Sūryā (daughter of the Sun) and Soma: "Sūryā mounted a chariot made of thought as she went to her husband" (áno manasmáyaṃ sūryā́, ā́rohat prayatī́ pátim) [Doniger's translation]. As will all the Ṛgvedic sūktas, what this means is open to interpretation. However there is another word manoratha, a chariot of the mind, which means 'a wish, a desire' especially one expressed indirectly. Along with Radich (2007: 225 - he cites a work in Japanese at this point) I think we can see this as the bride's enthusiasm to begin her sexual life with her husband - the Ṛgveda is unembarrassed about such things.

In Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad (BU) 4.4.5 we find the following passage reminiscent of Dhp 1-2:

sa vā ayam ātmā brahma vijñānamayo manomayo prāṇamayaś cakṣurmayaḥ śrotramayaḥ pṛthivīmaya āpomayo vāyumaya ākāśamayas tejomayo 'tejomayaḥ kāmamayo 'kāmamayaḥ krodhamayo 'krodhamayo dharmamayo 'dharmamayaḥ sarvamayaḥ |

The ātman is brahman: made of consciousness, made of mind, made of breath, made of the eye, made of ear, made of earth, made of water, made of wind, made of space, made of light, made of darkness, made of desire, made of non-desire, made of anger, made of non-anger, made of Dharma, made of non-Dharma, made of everything.

Note here the implication is very much "made of", but this is a passage from an Upaniṣad that is concerned with ontology, thus identical terms can take different meanings. The passage is part of a discussion of karma and rebirth which may well have influenced Buddhist ideas (BU 4.4). Hamilton notes that the first three items on the list (vijñānamaya, manomaya, and prāṇamaya) are taken up by the Taittirīya Upaniṣad (2.3) as an analysis of human existence. Breath makes up the bodily self; within this is a mind-made (manomaya) self; and within this again is a consciousness-made self (vijñānamaya). Hamilton sees this as evidence of existence on various levels of subtlety and density. While CU (6.5) speaks of three modes of existence: coarse (sthaviṣṭha), medium (madhyama) and subtlest (aṇiṣṭha). She says, "In corresponding to an intermediate subtle level of cosmological existence, manomaya therefore also corresponds to an intermediate stage on the path to liberation." (146)

Each more subtle mode seems to exist within the less subtle, suggesting concentric layers. Late Vedic existence, then, has three layers. There is an interesting difference in old and new Vedic views on the cosmos that Hamilton does not pick up on. The old Vedic cosmos was separated into earth, sky (literally 'between'), and heaven (pṛthivī, antarīkṣa, and svarga). These were layers of a flat universe one on top of the other, with fire-based rituals (yajña) providing a way of bridging the gap. The new Vedic cosmos of the Upaniṣads is radically different in it's geometry. This universe originates at a singularity in the heart (likened to a cave) where ātman dwells. From this central point the universe expands out in all directions. Whereas old Vedic ritual homologies enabled the sacrificer to ensure ṛta (roughly 'harmony') in the cosmos by performing the appropriate actions in the ritual; the new Vedic ātman centred universe was identified with, and established on the basis of, brahman. The one who identified with ātman in themselves, not only identified with the whole cosmos (idaṃ sarvaṃ), but, through the magic of homology, they actually became the whole cosmos. In Ṛgveda 10.90 the universe is created by the carving up of the primordial man (Puruṣa) as a sacrificial victim. In the Upaniṣads the integrated individual becomes the whole cosmos. This meant that using fire rituals to bridge the layers was unnecessary, because actually being the whole cosmos, obviates the need for anything so crude. Hamilton emphasises that there are no ontological discontinuities in either the old three tiered or the new concentric cosmos. However the early Upaniṣadic accounts of this cosmos are not systematic or even consistent.

Explicit reference to a subtle body (liṅga śarīra or sūkṣma śarīra) is rare, in fact singular, in the early Upaniṣads, but common in later Upaniṣads and in the commentaries of Śaṅkara. "Śaṅkara clearly identifies the manomaya body with the subtle body" (148). The equivalent word/words do not occur in Pali, even in the commentaries. We'll have to return to the subject of possible cross pollination with non-Buddhist religious ideas about subtle bodies in the next essay.

Buddhists analyse a person into one rūpakkhandha (masses of form) and four arūpakkhandha (masses without form). However Hamilton is quick to emphasise that, again, this is not an ontological distinction, not indicative of substance dualism (despite what many Buddhists think). From the Buddhist point of view all of the khandhas are experiential and all have the same nature, i.e. they are all impermanent, disappointing and insubstantial (in the sense of not providing a suitable anchor point for self identification). Despite later trends in Buddhist thought, rūpa/arūpa is an epistemological rather than ontological statement. Both impermanence and dependent arising are specifically features of mental activity in early Buddhist texts. In this worldview, though we are certain about the conditioned nature of experience, we are still none the wiser as to the nature of objects or the nature of the mind. But, as Hamilton says, this doesn't matter because: "What the phenomena are, in the ultimate sense, is irrelevant to attaining liberating insight" (149). This limitation on the domain of application of Buddhist ideas in early Buddhism is vital to understanding the basic metaphysics of early Buddhism. The philosophical problems involved in trying to generalise this observation about mental activity as a Theory of Everything are huge.

Buddhists also divided the "world" into three (flat) layers: kāmadhātu, rūpadhātu and arūpadhātu. However Buddhists added a twist in creating homologies between cosmological and psychological experiences. Each layer corresponds both to a realm or collection of realms in which beings can be reborn and to levels or states of meditation. Beings born in the various sub-levels of the kāmadhātu have form (rūpa) and experience sensual desire; and this corresponds to everyday consciousness. In the singular rūpadhātu beings have form (though it's not yet clear what this means); this corresponds to first four 'rūpa'jhānas which are characterised by increasing integration (samādhi) of the mind and the falling away of mental activity leaving equanimity. Finally in the various levels of arūpadhātu, beings who are formless and corresponds to the second lot of four 'arūpa'jhānas.

In the Ariyapariyesana Sutta the Buddha remarks that attaining the ākiñcaññāyatana (the sphere of nothingness; aka the third arūpajhāna) only leads to ākiñcaññāyatanūpapatti which literally means "rebirth in the sphere of nothingness"; where the verbal noun upapatti is the word most often used in connection with action of being reborn. The main sense is probably that having attained the ākiñcaññāyatana all that results is coming and going between ordinary awareness and ākiñcaññāyatana. There is no permanent radical reorientation of the psyche that we would usually equate with nibbāna. However, there is a implication of literal rebirth in the arūpadhātu or formless realm which corresponds to the psychological state.

Although the levels are to some extent reified into actual rebirth destinations, and elaborated on in this vein by commentators, this model seems to have been used as a metaphor for spiritual progress with increasing levels of attainment, purity, subtlety, and integration. Still there is no ontological distinction between the levels, they represent milestones on a continuous spectrum of attainment. Hamilton is thus cautious about the reading of, say, rūpadhātu as a literal place of rebirth which would have stronger ontological implications. There is some tension here between what seems to be implied by the suttas and how later Buddhists read the suttas. At some point Buddhists (including Māhāyānikas) abandoned any ontological reticence they had about rebirth realms.

3.2 Manomaya in the Pāḷi Suttas.

The term manomaya, then, is already in use in late Vedic texts which pre-date Buddhism and might reasonable be thought to influence early Buddhists. In Pali it is used in a similar way in the Poṭṭhapāda Sutta (DN 9). Poṭṭhapāda asks the Buddha if self (attan) and mental activity (saññā) are the same thing or different. Asked in turn what kind of self (attan) he believes in Poṭṭhapāda (described as a paribbājaka), declares three successive kinds of self, each of which is criticised by the Buddha.

"Oḷārikaṃ kho ahaṃ, bhante, attānaṃ paccemi rūpiṃ cātumahābhūtikaṃ kabaḷīkārāhārabhakkhan" ti

I believe in a material self (oḷārika attan), Bhante, with form (rūpa), the four main elements and nourished by material food

"Manomayaṃ kho ahaṃ, bhante, attānaṃ paccemi sabbaṅgapaccaṅgiṃ ahīnindriyan" ti.

I believe in a mind-made self (manomaya attan) with a complete set of limbs and functioning senses.

"Arūpiṃ kho ahaṃ, bhante, attānaṃ paccemi saññāmayan" ti

I believe in a formless self (arūpin attan) made of mental activity.

In each case the Buddha responds that:

Evaṃ santaṃ kho te, poṭṭhapāda, aññāva saññā bhavissati añño attā.... atha imassa purisassa aññā ca saññā uppajjanti, aññā ca saññā nirujjhanti. Iminā kho etaṃ, poṭṭhapāda, pariyāyena veditabbaṃ yathā aññāva saññā bhavissati añño attā" ti.

That being so, Poṭṭhapāda, saññā would be one thing and attan another... then [given such a self] some mental activity would arise in a person, and some would cease. The situation would be understood this way: saññā is one thing and attan is another.

A couple of little notes. The word attan has several references: it can mean body (as it might do here). Hīnidriya, i.e. hīna-indriya, means 'defective senses'. In the compound saññāmaya we're not entirely sure what saññā means. It can mean 'name'; 'the mind' (i.e. mental activity) generally, and the mental activity of 'perception' (or apperception) specifically. Walsh translates 'perception', but I think the more general sense probably applies here and have translated appropriately.

The main point here is that however one conceives of the self in relation to the three modes of existence, the self and mental activity are not identical. The reason is obvious to Buddhist thinkers: mental activity arises and passes away and a self is said to be permanent. Nothing that arises and passes away can be the permanent self. Or, the immortal soul cannot be found in experience (and for Buddhists experience is the only source of knowledge). Indeed the preceding paragraph in the Poṭṭhapāda Sutta establishes that knowledge arises on the specific condition of saññā:

"saññā paṭhamaṃ uppajjati, pacchā ñāṇaṃ, saññuppādā ca pana ñāṇuppādo hotī" ti

Mental activity arises first, knowledge arises after; and from the arising of mental activity knowledge arises.

With that proviso this passage seems as though it might reflect a view similar to that in the Taittirīya Upaniṣad above, where manomaya attan reflects the Sanskrit manomaya ātman idea of a subtle body. But note that here the Buddha rejects the idea as irrelevant to his liberation project.

Later in the text (DN i.197-202) the Buddha acknowledges the three types of attan: here referred to as attapaṭilābha'acquired self'. The commentary glosses attapaṭilābha = attabhāva and Hamilton associates each with a level of existence (and we can additionally relate these to the three levels of the cosmos):

oḷārika attapaṭilābha = kāmabhava ~ kāmadhātu
manomaya attapaṭilābha = rūpabhava ~ rūpadhātu
arūpa attapaṭilābha = arūpabhava ~ arūpadhātu

However in each case the Buddha is more concerned with the contradictions of identifying aspects of experience with the self, and with how to get rid of such an idea of self. One gets the sense here that the Buddha is taking his interlocutors beliefs on face value and then turning the conversation on it's head by showing that there is nothing desirable about any form of existence; and what's more the Buddha's teaching can be used to end (pahāna) all forms of existence. Thus I think here that Hamilton dwells too much on the characteristics of the different types of attapaṭilābha. They might be someone's view, but they don't form part of the early Buddhist worldview.

The Brahmajāla Sutta (DN 1), in its parody of Brahmanical belief, talks about beings born in the ābhassaro brahmā world who are mind-made. They feed on rapture (pīti), are self-luminous (sayaṃpabho), move through the intermediate realm (antalikkha-caro) and are beautiful (subhaṭṭhāyin). In other words they fit the sort of paradigm of floaty, ethereal, disembodied beings, like angels. The same passage occurs in the Mahāvastu (I'll deal with this along with other non-Pali Buddhist sources). Though note that they move through the intermediate realm (Skt antarīkṣa) which in Vedic thought is between heaven (svarga or devaloka) and earth. Does this mean that they move freely between the two? In Buddhist cosmology Brahmā beings are usually higher than devas in the hierarchy, not lower. Certainly devas are frequently portrayed as visiting the Buddha, so perhaps this requires freedom of movement through the antarīkṣa?

As the text is a parody of the whole idea of a creator god, we should be cautious of taking this sequence too seriously as cosmology. The terminology appears to drawn from Vedic mythology. However later Buddhists seem to have lost the sense of these stories and reified them: the mythic Brahmā world of the Upaniṣads and Purāṇa texts, where it represents the goal of the religious life of the Brahmins, becomes a saṃsāric, but literal rebirth destination (gati) for Buddhists.

Another passage in the Majjhima Nikāya (MN i.410) uses manomaya with reference to devas. Here there is an argument over the existence of immaterial realms (āruppā). Āruppa here is a substantive in -ya from arūpa'formless', and roughly means 'formlessness'. Strangely enough, here the Buddha claimsnot to be in a position to answer the question on the existence or not of an arūpa realm, which contrasts with other times when, for example, he apparently personally travels to Brahmā's realm. He argues that whether or not there is an āruppā, there is still the possibility of rebirth in the rūpadhātu:

ye te devā rūpino manomayā, apaṇṇakaṃ me tatrūpapatti bhavissati.

I might still be reborn amongst the those mind-made devas with form.

But the point of this discussion here is captured right at the end

So iti paṭisaṅkhāya rūpānaṃyeva nibbidāya virāgāya nirodhāya paṭipanno hoti.

Considering that this is so, he practices being fed up with forms, turning away from forms, and the cessation of forms.

Again the point is not to affirm or deny rūpadhātu or manomaya devas, but to orient people who have such beliefs away from kāmadhātu. Presumably having a belief in heaven is being leveraged to focus believers away from sense pleasure towards more refined types of pleasure (such as jhāna). The same sutta contains a number of similar arguments. The disputes about ontology do not need to be resolved for someone to practice Buddhist methods, nor does successful attainment of the goal rely on resolving such disputes.

In this connection one also thinks of Nanda and the dove-footed nymphs (Ud 3.2). The Buddha's cousin Nanda had become a monk but was thinking of giving up the homeless life because he found it too difficult. When asked why he says that as he was leaving a lovely Śākya women had said to him, "hurry back noble son" (tuvaṭaṃ kho, ayyaputta, āgaccheyyāsī’ti). The memory of her was making celibacy and austerity painful for him. So the Buddha uses his magical powers to take Nanda to the heaven of the thirty-three devas (devesu tāvatiṃsesu). There he saw 500 celestial goddesses ((pañca accharāsatāni)with feet of doves (kakuṭapādāni). Having seen these heavenly beauties he reassessed his opinion of ordinary beautiful women and found he could continue to practice and the shift of his attention, though apparently (to his fellow bhikkhus) still on attachment to pleasure, soon resulted in his liberation from craving. The point of this story is the same. One way to become disenchanted with ordinary sense pleasures is to begin to experience the bliss of higher states of consciousness (jhāna). Having experienced the bliss which has a cosmological counterpart in the deva realms, one will find ordinary sense pleasures uninteresting.

Conclusion

As far we can see the word mano-maya means 'made by the mental activity' rather than 'made of/in or from mental activity'. In other words there is no suggestion of ontological dualism inherent in the phrase. This observation notwithstanding, many Buddhists have chosen to interpret manomaya as having a dualistic connotation because they are ideologically committed to ontological dualism. And having made that commitment it is almost impossible to argue with them, since no evidence is available or required for belief in an immaterial "mind" entity. Dualism is not susceptible to reasoned argument. It is far easier to explain the afterlife if one starts from a position of dualism. In previous essays I've looked at why people have a predilection for post-mortem continuity and at some reasons dualist beliefs are so prevalent. It's not that difficult to understand. It's easy to imagine where such beliefs come from and why they persist into our era when science seems to so dominant as a way of understanding the world. But it also means that the kind of metaphysical problems that emerge when trying to think about the afterlife are bound to emerge.

Mano-maya seems generally to apply to supernatural beings only (except in one case where it seems to refer to the mental process of proliferation or papañca). Especially it applies to devas, and often to the most refined kind of devas (thought there is some confusion over whether it applies to both rūpadhātu and arūpadhātu. And at least some of the early texts are not asserting the existence of such devas, or that form of existence, they are stipulating them for the sake of argument and using the idea of higher, divine pleasures as a way to help people detach themselves from lower, sensual pleasures. One of the most important stories (repeated in a number of suttas) is a clear parody of Brahmanical belief about how the universe began.

Buddhists took the idea that mental events (dhammā) are made by the mind (Dhp 1-2) with it's lack of ontological connotation; combined them with existing cosmology and tried to turn it into a post-mortem ontology. And this leads us to the topic of the next essay which is the idea of a manomayakāya, a mind-made body.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Hamilton, Sue. (1996) Identity and Experience: The Constitution of the Human Being According to Early Buddhism. Luzac Oriental.

Hamilton, Sue. (2000) Early Buddhism : a new approach. The I of the beholder. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon.

Lee, Sumi. (2014) 'The Meaning of ‘Mind-made Body’ (S. manomaya-kāya, C. yisheng shen 意生身) in Buddhist Cosmological and Soteriological systems'. Buddhist Studies Review. 31(1): 65-90.

My essay on the word manomaya outlined how the word was originally used to refer to something made by mental activity (as opposed to 'made of mental activity'). This essay and the next will look at the idea of a body that is made by the mind (mano-maya kāya). This kind of kāya has historically been linked both to the Buddha's nirmaṇakāya (see Radich 2007) and to existence in the antarābhava. It is the latter relationship that interests us here.

As we will see below, kāya is a polysemic word. It is often used to mean 'body', but the PED explains that this is an applied meaning. Literally kāya means 'a collection or group', and suggests that it most likely derives from a verb root √ci'to heap up', though why or how is unclear. It might be via the perfect form, cikāya 'heaped', with loss of the reduplication. In Pali the body is a conglomeration of the four mahābhūtas or great elements (earth, water, heat, and wind = pṛthivī, āpo, tejas, and vāyu). A body made of these elements is referred to as rūpin'having form'. The PED definition of kāya covers 5 columns, making it one of the longer entries. Sometimes the different senses are played upon by Pali authors, e.g. kāye kāyānupassī which means 'contemplating the body as a collection of factors.' Equally kāya can mean a group of bodies, or a class of beings, and this combined with manomaya is the most importance sense in the Pali Nikāyas (note: a ni-kāya is also a 'collection') .

Many writers, including some who primarily write about Pali sources, employ the two words manomaya kāya as one, i.e. manomayakāya or hyphenate, i.e. manomaya-kaya. In the Pali Nikāyas and Abhidhamma it is always two words: manomaya kāya. It is not until the 5th century CE commentarial texts that the two words are compounded as one in Pali, though some Sanskrit texts use the compound as well.

A curious feature of early Buddhist cosmology is that it contained homologies between states of meditation and rebirth destinations (drawn from Vedic myth) in what we might call a psycho-cosmology. In early Buddhist texts jhāna (the noun for a particular state of integration achieved in meditation) is sometimes equivalent to rebirth in a devaloka. The verb for entering a jhāna state and for being reborn is upapajjati and its derivatives (upapanno, upapatti). We can imagine that Buddhists sought similes and metaphors to enable discussion about meditative states that tend to defy (literal) words. We can see that these jhāna states characterised by bliss, expansiveness (combined with integration), egolessness, timelessness and light accorded with some Brahmanical accounts of heaven. And while some Buddhist references to Brahmanical cosmology are obviously critical (to the extent of satirising the beliefs, e.g. the Agañña Sutta or the Tevijjā Sutta) at other times Brahmin gods are straight forward protagonists in the narrative. Gombrich (2009) has argued that, in some cases at least, what starts off as parody or metaphor becomes hypostatized and accepted on face value: e.g. the idea of a brahmaloka and dwelling with Brahmā (brahmavihāra). In order to accept brahmaloka as a rebirth destination and incorporate it into the psycho-cosmology, Buddhists had to forget that early positive references to it were ironic. (Compare The Buddha and the Lost Metaphor)

The early Buddhist suttas as preserved, represent an event horizon. We can infer a little about the processes involved in the formation of the Canon and in the composition of the texts, and we can guess at the chronology, but we cannot validate these inferences by external sources. So little survives from that period that we know next to nothing and that's as good as it gets. With this caveat we must, as always in studying Buddhist ideas, start with the early texts and see what they tell us and what we can reasonably infer from it.

Pali Suttas

Michael Radich's PhD dissertation (2007) counts nine contexts relating to manomaya kāya in the Pali suttas (2007: 229). We will have to compress this list considerably for brevity's sake (his dissertation runs to 1500 pages!). Describing one of the fruits of the ascetic life (samaññaphala) the Buddha describes the various benefits of dwelling in the fourth jhāna. Amongst which:

DN i.77 So evaṃ samāhite citte parisuddhe pariyodāte anaṅgaṇe vigatūpakkilese mudubhūte kammaniye ṭhite āneñjappatte manomayaṃ kāyaṃ abhinimmānāya cittaṃ abhinīharati abhininnāmeti. So imamhā kāyā aññaṃ kāyaṃ abhinimmināti rūpiṃ manomayaṃ sabbaṅgapaccaṅgiṃ ahīnindriyaṃ.

So with mind integrated, purified and cleansed, unblemished, corruptionless, malleable, workable, firm, and steadfast, he turns his thought (citta) and applies it to the magical creation of a mind-made body. From this body he magically creates another body, possessing form, mind-made, complete in limbs and with functioning senses.

The word I am translating as "magical creates" is abhinimmināti (abhi-nir√mā). The underlying verb √mā means 'measure, mark out', while both nir√mā and abhinir√mā have the sense of miraculous or magical creation; a creation by supernatural powers. This seems to be related to the word māya as well, which originally referred to the creative power of the devas, but came to mean something magically created and thus 'an illusion'. Elsewhere I've pointed out that in legend the Buddha's mother was called Māyā and that it probably meant creatrix. The creation of this kāya is followed by some similes which describe the result as like pulling a sword from a scabbard. The whole passage is repeated at DN i.209 (The Subha Sutta is largely made up of repetitions of passages from Samaññaphala Sutta) and again in the Majjhima Nikāya (where I translate somewhat more literally than has been the fashion):

MN ii.17 Puna caparaṃ, udāyi, akkhātā mayā sāvakānaṃ paṭipadā, yathāpaṭipannā me sāvakā imamhā kāyā aññaṃ kāyaṃ abhinimminanti rūpiṃ manomayaṃ sabbaṅgapaccaṅgiṃ ahīnindriyaṃ.

Furthermore, Udāyi, the practice of the disciples instructed by me, is such that practised, my disciples magically create from their body, another body, having form, made by the mind, with a complete set of limbs and functioning senses.

Seyyathāpi, udāyi, puriso muñjamhā īsikaṃ pabbāheyya; tassa evamassa – ‘ayaṃ muñjo, ayaṃ īsikā; añño muñjo, aññā īsikā; muñjamhātveva īsikā pabbāḷhā’ti.

Just as if, Udāyi, a man would remove a shaft from muñja grass. He would know this is the muñja, this is the shaft. Muñja is one thing, and the shaft is another. The shaft has been removed from the muñja. [See my article on arrow making materials in Pali]

Seyyathā vā panudāyi, puriso asiṃ kosiyā pabbāheyya; tassa evamassa – ‘ayaṃ asi, ayaṃ kosi; añño asi aññā kosi; kosiyātveva asi pabbāḷho’ti.

Or just as if a man were to remove a sword from its scabbard. He would know: this is the sword, this is scabbard. The sword is one and the scabbard another. The sword has been removed from the scabbard.

Seyyathā vā, panudāyi, puriso ahiṃ karaṇḍā uddhareyya; tassa evamassa – ‘ayaṃ ahi, ayaṃ karaṇḍo; añño ahi, añño karaṇḍo; karaṇḍātveva ahi ubbhato’ti.

Just a man would lift a snake from a basket. He would know: this is the snake, this is the basket. The snake is one, the basket is another. The snake has been lifted from the basket.

Snake charmer with cobra
in wicker basket on a train.
Maharashtra, 2003.
my photo.

Note that karaṇḍa is a general word for a container, typically a small wicker basket. It doesn't mean 'skin' or 'slough' in any dictionary I have access to. Indeed the Critical Pali Dictionary says "the meaning 'slough' is erroneously assumed...". Practically, the idea of "pulling a snake from its slough" is deeply unlikely. Snakes do shed (or slough) their skins from time to time, but people don't go around pulling them out. People avoid handling snakes! The more likely word for a snake's skin is taca (Skt tvac). Indeed PED sv taca says "Of the cast-off skin of a snake: urago va jiṇṇaŋ tacaŋ jahāti". The 'slough' idea is a mistake based on the commentary which at MNA 3.263 says "karaṇḍa: this means the 'jacket' (or 'armour' = kañcuka) of a snake (ahi) rather than a basket [woven from] of bamboo" (Karaṇḍāti idampi ahikañcukassa nāmaṃ, na vilīvakaraṇḍakassa). The term ahikañcuka (armour of a snake) only occurs in the commentaries. Anyone who has been to India has probably seen a wandering snake charmer, with a snake in a small wicker basket.

The muñja grass and sword similes are cited in the Jain Sūtrakṛtāṅga 2.1 (Jacobi 1895: 340) or in Prakrit Sūyagaḍaṃga, along with a few similar images. The Sūtrakṛtāṅga is thought to date from the 2nd century CE (making it contemporary with Nāgārjuna) and according to Johannes Bronkhorst it shows considerable influence from Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma (2011: 131). The similes given in a discussion on whether the jīva or soul, which is the same as the ātman, and the body are different.

Those who maintain that the soul is something different from the body, do not see the following (objections):
'As a man draws a sword from the scabbard and shows it (you, saying): "Friend, this is the sword, and that is the scabbard," so nobody can draw (the soul from the body) and show it (you, saying): "Friend, this is the soul, and that is the body."

The Sūtrakṛtāṅga warns against people who hold such views: "This murderer says: 'Kill, dig, slay, burn, cook, cut or break to pieces, destroy! Life ends here; there is no world beyond.' (Jacobi 340)

In the Pali example the other body (aññaṃ kāyaṃ) is made from this body (imamhā kāyā - the ablative case) and it has form (rūpin). In the description of manomaya, Sue Hamilton emphasised that manomaya is not intended to convey an ontological difference. Both the originating body and the created body are rūpin i.e. 'possess form'. This means that any body created by this process is accessible to the five senses (it can be seen, heard, touched etc). The idea of an immaterial "subtle body" which is made of different stuff seems not to be intended at any point in the Pali texts.

This sense of concentric layers, like Russian dolls, conveyed by the similes is reminiscent of the Upaniṣadic model of the universe centred on ātman. For example in the Taittirīya Upaniṣad:

tasmādvā etasmāt prāṇamayāt | anyo'ntara ātmā manomayaḥ | tenaiṣa pūrṇaḥ || 2.3 ||

Therefore, from this [self] made of breath, there is another self made of mind which fills it.

For the Upaniṣads there are more subtle selves within each self (anyo ātmā = añño attā) with brahman underlying all. We'll come back to this passage in more detail below.

As with the snake 'skin' there is another area in which we need to roll back some of the contemporary scholarship. Sometimes this creation of a new body is linked to the subsequent accomplishments such as the development of supernatural powers (iddhi) (Lee 2014:76, Radich 2007: 230-1). In the text however the two are not linked, they are two distinct benefits of fourth jhāna. In fact the section on manomaya kāya is definitely finished by the stock phrase before the discussion of iddhi begins.

Idampi kho, mahārāja, sandiṭṭhikaṃ sāmaññaphalaṃ purimehi sandiṭṭhikehi sāmaññaphalehi abhikkantatarañca paṇītatarañca. (DN i.77)

This too, Majesty, is a visible fruit of the ascetic life, more excellent and perfect that previous fruits of the ascetic life.

Radich (232) argues that a manomaya kāya"constitutes a necessary precondition for [iddhis]", for example, the supernatural power of travelling to Brahmā's world "in the body'" (as he puts it) must refer to the manomaya kāya in the previous section. So at DN i.77 the Pāli reads:

Yāva brahmalokāpi kāyena vasaṃ vatteti.

At will, he also goes as far as the realm of Brahmā with a body.

This is another fruit of the ascetic life and though it is presented sequentially, there is no explicit prerequisite except attaining the fourth jhāna. Elsewhere, as Radich (237-8) notes, we do find the Buddha recalling going to the Brahmāloka with a manomaya kāya.

Abhijānāmi khvāhaṃ, ānanda, iddhiyā manomayena kāyena brahmalokaṃ upasaṅkamitā ti.

Ānanda I do recall, going to Brahmā's realm with a mind-made body using supernatural powers.

Radich however stops his reading at that point which is a mistake. Because the next statement that the Buddha makes is:

Abhijānāmi khvāhaṃ, ānanda, iminā cātumahābhūtikena kāyena iddhiyā brahmalokaṃ upasaṅkamitā ti.

Ānanda, I do recall, going to Brahmā's realm with a body of the four major elements using supernatural powers.

In other words there is no need for the Buddha to assume a manomaya kāya to visit Brahmā's world, he can do it in his ordinary body composed of earth, water, heat and wind! This considerably weakens Radich's argument that supernatural powers require a manomaya kāya. As the Buddha says (SN v.282):

Acchariyā ceva, ānanda, tathāgatā acchariyadhammasamannāgatā ca, abbhutā ceva, ānanda, tathāgatā abbhutadhammasamannāgatā ca.

Ānanda the tathāgatas are awesome and endowed with awesomeness; the tathāgatas are amazing and endowed with amazingness.

This is also consistent with the Buddha's idea of "dwelling with Brahmā here and now" (brahmam etaṃ vihāraṃ idhamāhu) at the end of the Karaṇīya Metta Sutta. I follow Richard Gombrich (2009) in considering this part of a re-purposing of Vedic religious ideas (specifically worship of a creator god called Brahmā) for Buddhist ends. The peak experience of being full of mettā, karuṇā, muditā and upekkhā, is just like being in Brahmā's world (brahmavihāra) or just like (re)union with Brahmā (brahmasahavyata) as described by Brahmins. In the Tevijjā Sutta the Buddha asserts:

brahmānaṃ cāhaṃ, vāseṭṭha, pajānāmi brahmalokañca brahmalokagāminiñca paṭipadaṃ.

I know Brahmā, Vāseṭṭha, and Brahmā's domain, and the way leading to Brahmā's domain.

In other words the Buddha is seen to assert that Heaven can literally be experienced here and now, that heaven really exists and he (the Buddha) knows the way to Heaven, but he does this without any commitment to the idea of "Heaven" as understood by theists. He uses the Brahmanical word but uses it with a private meaning without explaining to the audience that he is doing this. The context, and the metaphorical and didactic nature, of his remarks seems to have been lost however and later Buddhists simply took these words on face value. Despite clear satirical intent in mentions of the Brahmaloka and other Brahmin cosmological ideas, Buddhists understood there to be a place (in the sense of somewhere one would be (re)born) called brahmaloka and that the Buddha could go there at will. (See also A Parody of Vedic Belief)

This issue highlights the metaphysical problem of allowing supernatural agents and forces. Such things demand an explanation and we try to explain them, but natural explanations are insufficient, so we tend to do so using more supernatural agents or forces. Reductive explanations short-circuit this tendency to proliferation and bring the whole thing down to earth. However they tend to discount miracles rather than account for them and many religieux find this objectionable.

A more interesting and important occurrence of manomaya kāya is at AN iii.50, where a Vesālī layman called Ugga is very generous towards the Buddha. My translation here follows Bodhi (2012) for reasons that will become apparent.

Kālakato ca uggo gahapati vesāliko aññataraṃ manomayaṃ kāyaṃ upapajji.

And having died, the landlord Ugga was reborn amongst a group of the mind-made [devas].

Here as Bodhi notes (2012: 1727-8, n.1033) kāya is taken by Buddhaghosa to mean 'group' rather than personal body (this nuance seems to be lost on Radich and Lee). As noted before, 'group' is the literal meaning of kāya. The commentary on this passage says:

"Aññataraṃ manomayan"ti suddhāvāsesu ekaṃ jhānamanena nibbattaṃ devakāyaṃ.

"Something mind-made" [means] one group of devas (devakāya) in the pure abodes created by mental activity (manas) in jhāna.

The reading is confirmed at AN iii.348 "tusitaṃ kāyaṃ upapanno" (reborn in the Tusita group); and at AN iii.122. This raises an interesting possibility. We've seen in discussing manomaya that it is most often associated with the deva realms. The Aṅguttara Nikāya also has a version of the discussion with Udāyī we discussed above. In the Nirodha Sutta (AN 5.166, iii.192f) we discover a conflict in progress. Udāyī maintains that having been reborn amongst a group of the mind-made (aññataraṃ manomayaṃ kāyaṃ upapanno) that is it impossible to emerge from the cessation of mental activity and experience (saññāvedayitanirodhaṃ). In other words Udāyī is claiming that rebirth amongst the rūpa devas is tantamount to vimutti.

[Buddha] kaṃ pana tvaṃ, udāyi, manomayaṃ kāyaṃ paccesī ti?
What then, would you call "manomaya kāya"?
[Udāyī] Ye te, bhante, devā arūpino saññāmayā ti.
Sir, those formless devas that consist [only] of mental activity.
[Buddha] Kiṃ nu kho tuyhaṃ, udāyi, bālassa abyattassa bhaṇitena!
What are you saying, Udāyī, is foolish and ignorant!

So on face value (see Bodhi n.1161) Udāyī is confusing devas who are formless (arūpa) with devas who have form (rūpa), though more precisely he is mistaken about the significance of attaining the formless jhānas (or their cosmological equivalents) in which mental activity and perception ceases. Thus we might read Udāyī as one who practised the arūpāyatana (formless realms) just like the Buddha's former teachers Āḷāra Kālāma and Udaka Rāmaputta. He came into conflict with orthodox Buddhists who focussed on the jhānas. Perhaps at this point the two approaches to meditation were not entirely integrated into Buddhism? The AN narrative then drifts off into a side story about respecting elder monks (i.e. it loses the plot). But it makes it certain that manomaya kāya here is "a group of the mind-made devas".

At AN v.337 the Buddha instructs Nandiya on devānusati, the practice of reflecting on devas:

Seyyathāpi, nandiya, bhikkhu asamayavimutto karaṇīyaṃ attano na samanupassati katassa vā paticayaṃ; evamevaṃ kho, nandiya, yā tā devatā atikkammeva kabaḷīkārāhārabhakkhānaṃ devatānaṃ sahabyataṃ aññataraṃ manomayaṃ kāyaṃ upapannā, tā karaṇīyaṃ attano na samanupassanti katassa vā paticayaṃ.

Just as if, Nandiya, a Bhikkhu timelessly-liberated perceives nothing to be done for themselves or any need to add to what has been done. Just so, Nandiya, those devas who surpass the devas that eat solid food, reborn in companionship with a group of the mind-made, they perceive nothing to be done for themselves or need to add to what has been done.

And the Buddha recommends that Nandiya establish "this internal mindfulness" (ajjhattaṃ sati upaṭṭhāpetabbā). This idea is not without its problems. Firstly, Buddhist cosmology is unequivocal in treating devas as inhabiting saṃsāra and thus fundamentally unlike the liberated. If the devas mentioned consider themselves free, then they are, by definition, deluded. But the Buddha is still recommending this reflection as a positive quality. The other recollections or reflections involve the tathāgata, the Dhamma, kalyāṇa mittas, and one's own generosity, which are all unambiguously positive. So we must presume that these devas are also seen positively. These reflections are recommended once one has established faith, virtue, vigour, mindfulness, integration and understanding (saddhā, sīla, viriya, sati, samādhi& paññā). But still manomaya kāya is a group of devas, not the subtle body of an individual.

In a single (repeated) passage the Buddha assumes a manomaya kāya to teach a disciple (Theragāthā 901 = AN iv.160) :

mama saṅkappamaññāya satthā loke anuttaro manomayena kāyena iddhiyā upasaṅkami.

Comprehending the drift of my thoughts, the unsurpassed teacher in the world approached by magical power with a body made of mental activity.

For Radich, with his interest in precursors to the nirmaṇakāya (reflecting D T Suzuki's comments on the Laṅkavatara Sūtra - see next essay), this verse is especially interesting. We can simply note that as the Buddha was accomplished in jhāna and otherwise capable of any number of miracles, the mention of a manomaya kāya in this context is not as astonishing as he seems to find it. In fact here two we could read the Buddha as appearing with a retinue of mind-made devas.

Conclusion

To summarise, manomaya kāya most often means 'a group of the mind-made' with reference to a group of devas. Secondarily it can mean a fully-formed (sabbaṅgapaccaṅgiṃ) and functioning (ahīnindriyaṃ) body, visible to the senses (rūpin), that is created from one's body (kāyā: ablative case) by mental activity in the fourth jhāna. For Buddhists entering (upa√pad) jhāna is functionally equivalent to rebirth (upa√pad) in the homologous deva realm. Everything points to association of this phrase with devas in one way or another.

We can now confirm from Pali sources that manomaya does not mean that they consist of mental activity because their bodies are rūpin, i.e. possess rūpa, but that they are created by mental activity (as opposed to being born presumably). Hamilton emphasises that the difference in bodies made by mental activity is a matter of varying density of form and that no distinct ontology seems to be implied in the Pali texts when the word manomaya is used.

We might called the mixing of psychological (meditative states) and cosmological (rebirth realms) in the Buddhist worldview "psycho-cosmology". In the Buddhist psycho-cosmology there is no strong distinction between jhāna and a devaloka. While some Buddhist hypostatize this relationship and treat the devalokas as literal realms of rebirth, it's possible that the relationship was more abstract or metaphorical in the past. And this is the context within which manomaya is mainly used.

Clearly the cosmological ideas of devas and Heaven derive from the Vedic tradition, but they underwent a series of transformations. In the received tradition we find manomaya kāya associated with the antarābhava and the gandharva in explaining the transition from one life to another. Having looked into the history of the various ideas, we can see that this conjunction is far from being intuitive. The Pali texts show no sign of it, so having surveyed them we must look beyond the Theravāda tradition to the traditions which accepted an antarābhava, because it is precisely where the antarābhava requires explanation that we find other more marginal terms (like manomaya and gandharva) being co-opted into larger narratives of the afterlife.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Aurobindo (2004) The Upanishads: Kena and other Upanishads. Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Dept.

Bronkhorst, Johannes. (2011) Buddhism in the Shadow of Brahmanism. Brill.

Bucknell, Roderick S. (2011) ‘The Historical Relationship Between the Two Chinese Saṃyuktāgama Translations.’ Chung-Hwa Buddhist Journal. 24:35-70.

Lee, Sumi. (2014) 'The Meaning of ‘Mind-made Body’ (S. manomaya-kāya, C. yisheng shen 意生身) in Buddhist Cosmological and Soteriological systems'. Buddhist Studies Review. 31(1): 65-90.

Jacobi, Hermann. (1895) Jaina Sutras, Part II (Sacred Books of the East, 45). http://www.sacred-texts.com/jai/sbe45/sbe4565.htm#page_340

Radich, Michael David. (2007) The Somatics of Liberation: Ideas about Embodiment in Buddhism from Its Origins to the Fifth Century C.E. [PhD. Dissertation]. https://www.academia.edu.

Essay no.400.

For the Nikāyakāra (the authors of the Pali Nikāyas) it was devas in the rūpadhātu (or their meditative equivalents) who possessed bodies (kāya) made by the mind, or were a mind-made group (kāya). Devas were supernatural beings, but they had the advantage of being part of the existing mythology of Buddhism (and the Ganges Valley generally). Devas were already culturally contextualised. Devas think, speak and interact with beings in the manussaloka (often with the Buddha) and thus, by the Buddhist understanding, they need to be embodied, to have a body endowed with senses, to possess all of the skandhas. We've seen (Manomaya Kāya: Pali Texts) that the Pali words for this are "rūpiṃ... sabbaṅga-paccaṅgiṃ ahīnindriyaṃ".

The antarābhava appears to be a new category of existence outside the universally accepted threefold model of the cosmos consisting of: kāmadhātu, rūpadhātu and arūpadhātu. Nor is it one of the five (later six) rebirth destinations (gati; sugati/durgati). These facts lie at the heart of the arguments of the sects that reject antarābhava. Like devas, beings in the antarābhava are conceived of as having cognition and thus they must be embodied in some form. Buddhists who believed in an antarābhava seem to have adapted the existing idea of a deva with a manomaya kāya to help explain the mode of existence in that state. This new mode of existence, outside of other models like the dhātus or gatis, implied a new ontology.

This essay will survey some of the non-Pali early Buddhist texts to see what use Buddhists made of manomaya in conjunction with antarābhava.

Samyuktāgama

One of the earliest references to this new ontology is in a Chinese translation of the Saṃyuktāgama (SĀ; the counterpart of the Pāḷi Samyuttanikāya). Lee ascribes this text to the Kāśyapīya Sect, which is "doctrinally close to the Sarvāstivāda". Bucknell (2011) tells is that SĀ is widely considered to have been translated in the period 435-443 CE from a Sanskrit Saṃyuktāgama brought to China from Sri Lanka". (Note there is another translation of the SĀ in Chinese)

佛告婆蹉。眾生於此處命終。乘意生身生於餘處。T99.244b03-05.

"When a sentient being exhausts the life-force in the present life, they ride (乘)
on a mind-made body (意生身) to be reborn in another place." (Adapted from Lee 2014: 70, Chinese from Radich 246 n.543)

The Pali counterpart of this passage (SN 44.9; iv.400) is also interesting, though it does not mention manomaya kāya. As noted in Arguments For and Against Antarābhava, it forms an essential part of arguments by Sujato and Piya Tan for the existence of an antarābhava, since it says:

Yasmiṃ kho, vaccha, samaye imañca kāyaṃ nikkhipati, satto ca aññataraṃ kāyaṃ anupapanno hoti, tamahaṃ taṇhūpādānaṃ vadāmi.

With respect to that, Vaccha, at the time when the body is relinquished, and a being is not arisen in certain kāya, I call that fuelled by craving.

I discussed how we might understand this passage in context in my earlier essay on antarābhava. Vaccha is asking about people who are not reborn and I said:

"To then read the question about rebirth in temporal terms, as explaining a time gap between bodies (kāya) is to misunderstand the metaphor. The question, really, is about what drives a person (satta) from body to body."

The idea of a satta (Skt sattva) going from body to body is consistent with Brahmin eschatology and we guess from his name (Vaccha is a Brahmin clan name) and the drift of his questions that Vacchagotta is a Brahmin. I also noted that "taṇha is always the upādāna for bhava" and that it cannot be considered specific to this case. I noted that the idea of a gap between lives may well have been Vaccha's and the Buddha simply failed to dispute it. Vacchagotta frequently pesters the Buddha and other bhikkhus with questions about ontological issues: "is there a self?" or "does the tathāgata exist after death?" and so on. In SN 22.10 (the next sutta) the Buddha refuses to answer his questions about the existence of self because any answer would have confused the Brahmin. Often such questions are said to be avyākata'without explanation', by which the Buddha seems to mean that they can't be answered with certainty, only with speculation and he doesn't speculate, but that in any case they are irrelevant to the task at hand (Cf Cūlamālunkya Sutta MN 63).

In the Saṃyuktāgama texts antarābhava is one of four modes of existence (caturbhava) (Lee 2014: 70):

rebirth (生有 = upapattibhava)
life (本有 = pūrvakālabhava)
death (死有 = maraṇabhava)
between (中有 = antarābhava)

Antarābhava here seems to be well developed as an idea and as a state of existence has the same status as life; with death and rebirth as transitions between states - but all four having the same label bhava. We see here the beginnings of the Tibetan system of six bardos (which adds the states of dreaming and meditation). The antarābhava is no longer only a transition phase between kāmadhātu and rūpadhātu, as we saw in the discussion of the antarāparinirvāyin (Arguments For and Against Antarābhava).

In the《阿毘達磨大毘婆沙論》or *Mahāvibhāṣā, an encyclopaedic and influential Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma text which survives only in Chinese translation (T.27, no. 1545), we see, probably for the first time the equating of a number of terms: antarābhava, manomaya, gandharva and saṃbhavaiṣin (literally: 'one who seeks birth'). The Mahāvibhāṣā re-interprets manomaya to mean: "[beings in the antarābhava] are born complying with the mind" (Lee 2014: 74) and further to include "beings at the beginning of kalpas, all the beings of the intermediate existence (antarābhava), [the devas of] the pure form realm (rūpadhātu) and the formless realm (arūpadhātu), and the transformative bodies (*pariṇāma-kāya)." This seems to build on categories very like the ones we find in Pali. The category of pariṇāmakāya is obscure here, but taken up by some Mahāyāna texts. Vasubandhu, in his Abhidharmakośabhāṣya, continues the tradition of linking antarābhava, manomaya, gandharva and saṃbhavaiṣin.

Ekottarāgama

The word manomaya occurs in some Sanskrit fragments of the Ekottarāgama (EĀ; Tripathi 1995) which is a counterpart of the Pali Aṅguttara Nikāya. Here EĀ proposes two kinds of manomaya kāya which depend on the conduct of the being, i.e. an ethicized version of the manomaya kāya in SĀ.

yo 'sau bhavati strī vā puruṣo vā duḥśīlaḥ pāpadharmāḥ kāyaduścaritena samanvāgato vāṅmanoduścaritena samanvāgatas tasya kāyasya bhedād ayam evaṃ rūpo manomayaḥ kāyo 'bhinirvartate tadyathā kṛṣṇasya kutapasya nirbhāsaḥ andhakāratamisrayā vā rātryā yeṣāṃ divyaṃ cakṣuḥ suviśuddhaṃ ta enaṃ paśyanti || EĀ 18.51 ||

That woman or man of bad conduct and evil-nature, endowed with bad behaviour of the body and bad behaviour of speech and mind, with the breaking up of the body [at death] they give rise to (abhinirvartate) a form, a mind-made body. It has the appearance of a black blanket or the blinding darkness of night, which they see with the purified divine eye.

yo 'sau bhavati strī vā puruṣo vā śīlavān kalyāṇaadharmāḥ kāyaduścaritena samanvāgato vāṅmanahsucaritena samanvāgatas tasya kāyasya bhedād ayam evaṃ rūpo manomayaḥ kāyo 'bhinirvartate tadyathā śuklasya paṭasya nirbhāsaḥ jyotsnāyā vā rātryā yeṣāṃ divyaṃ cakṣuḥ suviśuddhaṃ ta enaṃ paśyanti || EĀ 18.52 ||

That woman or man of ethics and good-nature, endowed with good behaviour of the body and good behaviour of speech and mind, with the breaking up of the body [at death] produce a form, a mind made body. It has the appearance of white cloth or a moonlit night, which they see with the purified divine eye.

This phrasing is both similar to and different from Pali counterparts. The image appears to be absent from the Pali. The closest we get is this:

So kāyena duccaritaṃ caritvā vācāya duccaritaṃ caritvā manasā duccaritaṃ caritvā, kāyassa bhedā paraṃ maraṇā apāyaṃ duggatiṃ vinipātaṃ nirayaṃ upapajjati.

So kāyena sucaritaṃ caritvā vācāya sucaritaṃ caritvā manasā sucaritaṃ caritvā, kāyassa bhedā paraṃ maraṇā sugatiṃ saggaṃ lokaṃ upapajjati. (SN i.93)

Having behaved badly with the body, behaved badly with the voice, and behaved badly with the mind, with the breaking up of the body after death, he goes to a bad destination, a state of suffering, reborn in hell.

Having behaved well with the body, behaved well with the voice, and behaved well with the mind, with the breaking up of the body after death, he goes to a good destination, reborn in heaven.

The idea of a dark and bright manomaya using much the same terminology (highlighted in bold) is reflected much later in Asaṅga's version of the antarābhava in his Bodhisattvabhūmi (Chapter 3.6; Cf Wayman 1974: 233)

dvābhyām ākārābhyāṃ tamaḥ-parāyaṇānām ayam evaṃ rūpo manomayo 'ntarābhavo nirvartate | tadyathā kṛṣṇasya kutapasya nirbhāsaḥ andhakāra-tamisrāyā vā rātryāḥ | tasmād durvarṇā ity ucyante |

Because of the two modes [of action] thus a form which is mind-made in the interim state is produced filled with darkness, just like the appearance of a black blanket or the blinding darkness of night. Because of that they call it “inferior”.

ye punardvābhyām ākārābhyāṃ jyotiḥ-parāyaṇās teṣām ayam evaṃ rūpo manomayo 'ntarābhavo nirvartate | tadyathā jyotsnayā rātryā vārāṇaseyakasya vā sampannasya vastrasya | tasmātsuvarṇā ityucyante | (Dutt 269 Wohihara ed 390-91)

Because of the two modes [of action] a form which mind-made in the interim state is produced which is filled with light, just like a moonlit night or excellent cloth that comes from Vārāṇasi. Therefore they call it “superior”.

The context shows that this passage is also referring to duścarita and sucarita. One leads to a bad destination (durgati-gāmina) the other to a good destination (sugati-gāmina).

Mahāvastu & Lalitavistāra

This pair of texts, composed in Sanskrit, are often seen as transitional between early Buddhist and Mahāyāna texts. Sumi Lee doesn't go into these seminal texts or their use of manomaya kāya, perhaps because their treatment of manomaya kāya is similar to the Pali. In Sanskrit we do begin to see manomayakāya as a compound.

In the Mahāvastu (Mhv) there is a retelling of the beginning of a new epoch of the cosmos (cf DN i.17). The first beings to come into existence are self-luminous, move through the sky (antarīkṣa), are mind-made, feed on rapture, are in a state of bliss, and can move about as they wish. (svayaṃprabhāḥ antarīkṣacarā manomayā prītibhakṣāḥ sukhasthāyino yenakāmaṃgatāḥ Senart 1.338; cf. Jones 285-286). A little further on when these beings fall from this refined state due to greed, they lose the state of being a mind-made group (manomayakāyatā). Thus the usage in Mahāvastu closely reflects the Pali usage. Manomaya kāya refers to devas and is used in conjunction with this old parody of Brahmanical notions of cosmogony (which may have been hypostatised by this time).

The phrase manomaya is used just twice in the Lalitavistāra Sūtra (Lv). Firstly it is used in a gāthā:

atha khalu sunirmito devaputro rājānaṃ śuddhodanam upasaṃkramyaivam āha—manomayam ahaṃ śrīmadvaśma tad ratanāmayam |
bodhisattvasya pūjārtham upaneṣyāmi pārthiva || Lal_6.18 || [Vaidya 46]

Then indeed a beautifully formed divine child approached King Śuddhodanam and said:
I will offer a mind-made, glorious jewelled mansion;
As an act of worship of the bodhisattva, O King.

My translation here follows the Dharmachakra Translation Committee translation of the Tibetan in taking śrīmad-vaśma to mean "a glorious mansion". My dictionaries have no word vaśma[n]; it may be a hyper-Sanskritisation of vasman'nest' (from √vas'to dwell'). Here manomaya must mean 'made by the mind' in the sense of 'mental' or 'imaginary'. Compare ratanā-maya'made of jewels' or 'jewelled'. Note that Bays translation obscures the presence of the word manomaya.

Secondly manomaya is once again used with reference to some devas, in this case devakanyā or the girls of the devas. They are described as divya-manomaya-ātmabhāva-pratilabdha (Vaidya 36) terms familiar from the discussion of manomaya especially DN i.197-202. The term attapaṭilābha'acquired self' (Skt ātmapratilabdha) which Buddhaghosa glossed as attabhāva'a state of self' (Skt ātmabhava) and the sutta describes as having three types: oḷārika, manomaya, and arūpa; with the second being associated with the rūpadhātu. So the Lv adjective means 'having the acquired state of self of a divinity' though what this means in practice is not clear. Thus in these transitional period texts we are not seeing an association with antarābhava or the afterlife at all.

Conclusion

One important point to make with respect to the antarābhava and manomaya kāya is that the Āgama texts reflect the view of the sect who preserved them and the Nikāya texts (largely) reflect the Theravāda view. My inclination is to explain this presence and absence as the addition of antarābhava to the texts of those who believed in it. Of course, it is impossible to eliminate the possibility that the antarābhava has been retrospectively expunged from the Pali texts. This however suggests proactive editing on a much larger scale than I have ever encountered. It seems more likely that as time went on new ideas were added in, than that old ideas were expunged. Buddhist texts tend to be quite conservative of old ideas. Presumably some ideas were introduced and subsequently died out. For some of these we no doubt have stubs in the Canon - brief mentions with no follow up.

Our non-Pali witnesses further confuse the situation: the Chinese Āgama translations are from the 4th or 5th century CE and at least in the texts I've studied, section 5 of the Madhyāgama for example, show a higher degree of standardisation and homogenisation than the Pali texts. The Sanskrit translations are similar to the Pali texts, but also distinct in many ways, suggestive of long separation between Sanskrit- and Pali-using sects.

What we do know is that some lines of development across the spectrum of early Buddhist thought included references to a manomaya kāya in the antarābhava and others only mention manomaya kāya with respect to the psycho-cosmology of the deva realms. The development of the idea of manomaya kāya in Buddhism seems to go like this:

Devas in the rūpadhātu are a manomaya (ni)kāya (group).
Meditators in the fourth jhāna magically create (abhinir√mā) a manomaya kāya (body) which is rūpin (out-of-body experiences?)
Non-returners (anāgāmin) transitioning from the kāmadhātu to the rūpadhātu do so in a manomaya kāya (body).
The advent of antarābhava leads to all beings having (or "riding") a manomaya kāya in the interim between death and rebirth.
Antarābhava and manomayakāya are equated, along with gandharva.

In these early Buddhist texts there are two distinct metaphysics reflecting a binary split over the time interval between death and rebirth. The sole surviving representatives of those who claimed no interval, the Theravādins, dealt with this issue as part of their comprehensive response to the problems in the tradition, as part of their Abhidhamma: a stream of citta moments, connected in up to twenty-four ways (paccayatā), according to certain restrictions (niyama) making no initial ontological distinctions. In this and related schools manomaya kāya largely remains a description of beings in the rūpadhātu well into the common era. And this does not stop Theravādins on the ground believing in an interim state, or beings in an interim state, or subtle bodies.

On the other hand if one stipulates that it takes some appreciable time for rebirth to occur, then certain questions arise. In particular we want to know what form of existence one has between death and rebirth, since non-existence is nonsensical. The proposed explanation had to avoid the trap of eternalism by not being nicca, sukha, and attan, but it had to explain the connectivity and continuity (in karmic terms). Additionally, for most Buddhists, especially in the ancient world, it could not conflict with scripture. Proponents of antarābhava had to invent a whole new field of inquiry and vocabulary for it. The previous unrelated term manomaya formed part of this new metaphysics.

In the next essay in this series we'll look at some Mahāyāna sources to get a flavour of how the idea developed in those (many and various) milieus. A comprehensive survey is neither within my means or skill level, but by looking at some influential texts, Śāntideva's anthology of sūtra texts, Śikṣasamuccaya, and Vasubandu's Bhāṣya, we can at least get a sense of how some of the more prominent Buddhists of later periods viewed manomaya kāya.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Aurobindo (2004) The Upanishads: Kena and other Upanishads. Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Dept.

Bucknell, Roderick S. (2011) ‘The Historical Relationship Between the Two Chinese Saṃyuktāgama Translations.’ Chung-Hwa Buddhist Journal. 24:35-70.

Dharmachakra Translation Committee. (2013) The Play in Full: Lalitavistara. [Ārya-lalitavistara-nāma-mahāyāna-sūtra] http://read.84000.co/browser/released/UT22084/046/UT22084-046-001.pdf

Jones, J J. (1949) The Mahāvastu. Vol. 1 Luzac. https://archive.org/stream/sacredbooksofbud16londuoft#page/286/mode/2up

Lee, Sumi. (2008) 'The Philosophical Meaning of Manomaya-kāya.'2008 Korean Conference of Buddhist Studies. http://www.skb.or.kr/down/papers/129.pdf [pages not numbered]

Lee, Sumi. (2014) 'The Meaning of ‘Mind-made Body’ (S. manomaya-kāya, C. yisheng shen 意生身) in Buddhist Cosmological and Soteriological systems'. Buddhist Studies Review. 31(1): 65-90.

Radich, Michael David. (2007) The Somatics of Liberation: Ideas about Embodiment in Buddhism from Its Origins to the Fifth Century C.E. [PhD. Dissertation]. https://www.academia.edu.

Senart, Émile. (1897) Mahavastu-Avadana. 3 vols., Paris 1882-1897. http://gretil.sub.uni-goettingen.de/gretil/1_sanskr/4_rellit/buddh/mhvastuu.htm

Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro. (1930) Studies in the Lankavatara Sutra. Routledge.

Tripathi, Chandra Bhal (1995) Ekottarāgama-Fragmente der Gilgit-Handschrift, Reinbek 1995 (Studien zur Indologie und Iranistik, Monographie 2). http://gretil.sub.uni-goettingen.de/gretil/1_sanskr/4_rellit/buddh/ekottaru.htm

Vaidya, P. L. (1963) Saddharmalaṅkāvatārasūtram. The Mithila Institute of Post-Graduate Studies and Research in Sanskrit Learning. Darbhanga.

Wayman, Alex (1974) 'The Intermediate-State Dispute in Buddhism' in Buddhists Studies in Honour of I. B. Horner. D Reidel: 227-239.

Ba - the soul in the form of a bird
with a human head from Egypt.

This last section of my long essay on manomaya kāya (in four parts) looks at some Mahāyāna texts. The literature is far too massive for me to attempt a comprehensive survey. The idea here is to get an outline from some well known sūtras (the sūtras likely to be cited in modern discussions on rebirth). Vasubandhu gives us some idea of the range of views in his milieu (5th century Gandhāra), likewise Śāntideva's anthology of sūtras gives us an idea of what was important in his sect at that place and time (8th century Bihar). Following this thread is important because it fed into an account of karma and rebirth that became standard across the Mahāyāna world.

Prajñāpāramitā

The Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra is widely thought to be the earliest of the Prajñāpāramitā texts along with a verse version (Ratnaguṇasamcayagāthā). It was probably composed before the common era. Recently a manuscript turned up in Afghanistan that was carbon dated to the first century CE. In the Aṣṭa there's a single reference to manomaya in Chapter 2. The God Śakra, aka the Vedic god Indra, decides to conjure up some flowers (puṣpāṇy abhinirmāya) to scatter over Subhūti who has been talking to him about the Prajñāpāramitā. Subhūti thinks:

yāni śakreṇa devānām indreṇābhyavakīrṇāni, manomayāny etāni puṣpāṇīti

These flowers scattered about by Śakra, Lord of the Devas, are mind-made.

As in Pāḷi, the meaning must be 'made by the mind', if for no other reason than they are external to Śakra's mind. In this case, at least in the context of the story, they are not imaginary, but conjured up (abhi-nir√mā), consistent with what we saw last week in the Mahāvastu and Lalitavistara. We know that the authors of the Aṣṭa were opponents of the Sarvāstivāda in other matters, so it's possible that they also rejected the antarābhava and the associated metaphysics which dragged in terms like manomaya. The term antarābhava does not occur in the Aṣṭa or in the expanded Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra.

However from this text we get the useful information that the Aṣṭakāra thought that the process leading to something mano-maya could be conveyed by the verb abhi-nir√mā. This allows us to get a fix on what kind of process we are talking about. I'll return to this in my conclusions.

Saddharmapuṇḍarikā

Again we find a single use of manomaya in Chapter 8 this sūtra. This description pertains to the future buddha-field (buddhakṣetra) of the disciple Pūrṇa. That buddha-field will be flat, filled with precious things; gods will live close to the earth and will meet with men; women and evil will be banished (apagata) and:

sarve ca te sattvā aupapādukā bhaviṣyanti brahmacāriṇo manomayair ātmabhāvaiḥ svayaṃprabhā ṛddhimanto vaihāyasaṃ-gamā vīryavantaḥ smṛtimantaḥ prajñāvantaḥ suvarṇavarṇaiḥ samucchrayair dvātriṃśadbhir-mahāpuruṣalakṣaṇaiḥ samalaṃkṛta-vigrahāḥ (Vaidya 129)

And all these beings will be self-produced, by the self-radiant, mind-made, self-nature of religious disciples endowed with magical powers, going through the air, vigour, mindfulness, understanding, beauty, and highly ornamented, magnificently with the thirty-two marks of the mahāpuruṣa.

This ideal world (apparently imagined by celibate male monks) is obviously related to the Pali ideas in the Samaññaphala Sutta (DN 2) and the Manāsakuludāyi Sutta (MN 77). Being mind-made is part of an idealised picture of the world. The devas, while still, perhaps, not ontologically different from human beings, represent a refined form of being: less material, and thus more pure (there is a touch of Vitalism about this worldview). The author obviously thought that men and gods being able to meet would be a good thing.

Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra

The Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra (Vaidya 1963) has three kinds of manomayakāya in Chapter 3. The Laṅka is something of a jumbled mess composed in a very dense, jargonistic and elaborate literary Sanskrit that is very difficult to translate (and more than likely corrupt in many places). What's more, it's very difficult to match D. T. Suzuki's translation to the Sanskrit text (he may well have followed the Chinese in places). Suzuki himself notes the difficulties that the Chinese translators had in interpreting long agglutinated words (1932: 118 n.1). All in all the Laṅka is not an attractive prospect, but it did have a lot of influence in Zen Buddhism.

Suzuki, bizarrely chooses "will body" to translate manomaya. This has no connection to either how the term is used more generally or to the etymology. I found several faults in Suzuki's translation (that would take considerable time and space to explain, so I will leave that for now, but might make it a separate essay). If one knows that Red Pine renders the Chinese translations of manomaya kāya even more bizarrely as "projection body" (for reasons that escape me) then one can locate the counterparts in his translation (167-8), which are somewhat more comprehensible though one is unsure at what cost to the original text. My tentative translation of the relevant passage follows:

Chapter 3, Section LVII (cf. Suzuki p.118-9)

The Bhagavan said: Mahāmati the body that is made by the mind is of three kinds. What three kinds?
made by the mind that attains the bliss of samādhi;
made by the mind through awaking to the intrinsic nature of dharmas;
made by the mind whose actions and volitions are inherent to that class.
The yogins understand because they comprehend the characteristics of higher and higher bhumis from the first.

With respect to that, Mahāmati, what is a body which is made by the mind that attains the bliss of samādhi? It is in the 3rd, 4th and 5th bhūmis. By dwelling apart from the diversity of his own mind, there is no activity of a mind which attains the bliss of samādhi characterised by cognition of the waves of activity of ocean of thought, because, with his own mind (manas) he comprehends arising and passing away in the visible sphere as his own thoughts (svacitta) [so] it is called “a body that is made by the mind”.

What is the body that is made by the mind through awaking to the intrinsic nature of dharmas? There, in the eight bhūmi, by awakening through investigation to vanishing dharmas as illusions, etc, [the yogins] attain the illusion-simile samādhi of turning around in the basis (āśraya) of thought, and attain other important samādhis. The body whose flowering is the direct knowledge of subduing the single characteristic; which is swift as thought; appearing like an illusion, a dream or a reflection; resembling a true reality though unreal; supplied with limbs of all kinds; a follower of the maṇḍala of the societies of all the Buddha-fields; because of having understood the intrinsic nature of dharmas is called ‘mind-made’.

Now, what is the body made by the mind whose actions and volitions are inherent to that class of beings. It is because of awakening to the characteristic of bliss of one’s own realisation (pratyātmādhigama) of the Dharma of all buddhas that is it called ‘made by the mind whose actions and volitions are inherent to that class of beings’. Mahāmati you should do yoga with respect to the awakening by the investigation of these three characteristics of the body.

The first type of manomaya kāya (attained in samādhi) is also described by an isolated paragraph (obviously out of context) in Chapter 2 (Section XXX) which, for the first and only time that I am aware of, explicitly links the possession of the manomaya kāya with the exercise of the ṛddhi or supernatural powers (though not quite the same as the standard list that we see in the Pāli suttas).

While I find fault with Suzuki's translation and have attempted my own translation, I don't claim to have made better sense of the text, indeed the text barely makes sense. Reading the Laṅka is like reading English prose from which all the prepositions and most of the verbs have been stripped out, leaving a string of nouns with no indication of how they relate to each other. Unless one knows in advance what it will say, understanding it by reading it as Sanskrit literature is an exercise in frustration. On the other hand Suzuki is clearly reading ideas into the text that do not belong there. The most egregious example is when he reads "when he thus recognises the non-existence of the external world, which is no more than his own mind" into a passage that ought to say "because, with his own mind he comprehends arising and passing away in the visible sphere as his own thoughts." Suzuki replaces the metaphysical reticence of the text (in line with Nāgārjuna and the Kātyāyana Sūtra) with his own hardcore Idealism.

What the text seems to get at is that mind-made bodies are or can be produced at three stages. In samādhi, up to the fifth bhūmi where the bodhisattva perfects samādhi. At the 8th bhūmi where they experience cittāśraya-parāvṛtta 'reversal or disappearance of the basis of thoughts', the point at which their state is irreversible. It is said to be equivalent to being an arhat (but this is a redefinition of arhat which doesn't correspond to how the word was used in earlier texts; it is more like stream-entry in fact). The Laṅka doesn't associate the last kāya with a bhūmi but implies that it accords with the 10th bhūmi at which point the bodhisattva's mere existence benefits all beings.

There's no apparent history to this idea of three manomayakāya, and no subsequent connection to other texts. Suzuki (1930: 208 ff) wants to relate it to the trikāya doctrine, though this is a stretch, given how it fits with the bodhisattva bhūmi model. It doesn't seem to be developed beyond this point either.

Śikṣasamuccaya

The Śikṣasamuccaya is a compendium of sūtra readings compiled by Śāntideva in about the 8th century as a guide to Buddhism. Many of the sūtras cited have been lost in their Indic languages and survive only in translation (if at all). The Śikṣa is a useful snapshot of what Buddhist texts were important in Bihar in about the 8th century, the more so since not long afterwards Buddhism was transmitted to Tibet from this region.

Manomayakāya is mentioned once in the first chapter on the perfection of giving as a part of a transference of merit practice:

sarvasatvā 'śrāntāklānta-sarvalokadhātugamanā bhavantu |
aviśrāmyamāna-manomayakāya-pratilabdhāḥ |

May all beings enter all worlds and realms unwearied and not tired,
having acquired a mind-made body that doesn't need to rest.

[NB I have slightly amended the Sanskrit given by DSBC as the compound must be aśranta-aklānta- "not-tired and not weary" rather than śranta-aklānta "tired and not weary"]

This short quote suggests that all beings (sarvasatvā) can expect to have a manomaya-kāya as they go (gamana) to a new world (loka) or realm (dhātu) which is suggestive of the Saṃyuktāgama version (see Manomaya Kāya: Other Early Texts) of the antarābhava. However, antarābhava is not mentioned at all. The paucity of our terms here is suggestive, that Śāntideva also rejected an antarābhava through his association with Prajñāpāramitā, though arguments from absence are weak.

Other Sūtras

The later part of Sumi Lee's 2014 article, which has underpinned this whole series of essays on manomaya kāya, focuses on the Śrīmālādevī Siṃhanāda Sūtra and texts which draw on it for inspiration. The Śrīmālā forms the template for a number of later texts and describes the manomaya kāya as the three types of bodies of arhats, pratyekabudhas and vaśitaprāpta bodhisattvas (this does not tally with the threefold model in the Laṅka). Lere also mentions that the Gandhavyūha Sūtra mentions ten types of manomaya kāya (2014: 75).

Both the Śrīmālā and the Laṅka propose that the three types of being with mind-made bodies undergo a special type of death known as 'inconceivable transformative death' (acintya-pāriṇāmikī-cyuti or -pāriṇāma-) which is distinct from ordinary or discontinuous death (pariccheda-cyuti). In this worldview the three, though high up in the hierarchy of being, still have a specific type of defilement (entrenched ignorance or avidyāvāsa-bhūmi) that forces them to be embodied, if only in a manomaya kāya.

Various śāstra texts take up this idea and develop it. I don't propose to go into these developments in depth as they lead further and further away from the early tradition and into speculative metaphysics (see Lee 2014).

Manomaya does not appear to occur in the Sukhāvativyūha Sūtras or the Vimalanikīrtinirdeśa.

Vasubandhu

One of the most influential works on how we see the history of Buddhist ideas is the Abhidharmakośa-bhāṣya by Vasubandhu, probably composed in the 4th century CE. The Bhāṣya is the prose auto-commentary on the verse Abhidharmakośa (Kośa). It is frequently cited as a source on the views of schools like the Sarvastivādins, and Vasubandhu was certainly on the side of those who believed in an antarābhava (though it seems he sometimes dissents from mainstream Sarvāstivāda views and favours a Sautrāntika view). Vasubandhu's arguments about the antarābhava warrant their own treatment, but he does make mention of the manomaya kāya on several occasions that we can look at here.

In the commentary on Kośa kārikā 2.44e: nirodhākhyādito nṛṣu, Vasubandhu, in answer to a quibble of the Vaibhāṣikas, cites a version of the same Udāyi Sūtra (the snake and basket simile) we've already cited in Manomaya Kāya: Pali Texts. The argument is over one can fall from the attainment of cessation (nirodhasamāpatti).

Vasubandu says:

anyathā hi udāyisūtraṃ virudhyeta | ihāyuṣmanto bhikṣuḥ śīlasaṃpannaśca bhavati samādhisaṃpannaśca prajñāsaṃpannaśca | so 'bhīkṣṇaṃ saṃjñāvedayita-nirodhaṃ samāpadyate ca vyuttiṣṭhate "cāsti caitat sthānam" iti yathābhūtaṃ prajānāti | sa na haiva dṛṣṭa eva dharme pratipattye vājñām ārāgayati nāpi maraṇakālasamaye bhedāc ca kāyasyātikramya devān kavaḍīkārāhāra-bhakṣān anyatarasmin divye manomaye kāya upapadyate | sa tatropapanno 'bhīkṣṇaṃ saṃjñāveditanirodhaṃ samāpadyate ca vyuttiṣṭahate cāsti caitat sthānamiti yathābhūtaṃ prajānātīti | [p. 072 - there are minor errors in the Gretil text at the time of writing.]

Opposition contradicts the Udāyi Sūtra. [Which says] "Here friend, a bhikṣu accomplished in the threefold way of ethics, meditation and understanding. He realistically considers that it is possible to repeatedly attain and abandon the cessation of perception and sensation. But if he does not also attain understanding in this very life, nor even at the time of death, [then] with the breaking up of the body, he arises in a divine mind-made group who have transcended eating solid food, and there, he realistically considers that is is possible to repeated enter and leave the cessation of mental activity and experience."

My translation here is much more literal than the one found in Prudent (1988). Then a line later:

atra hi divyo manomayaḥ kāyo rūpāvacara ukto bhagavatā | [072]

For here, the Bhagavan said, the rūpāvacara devas are a mind-made group.

Again Pruden is very different here. The idea that kāya can also mean 'a group' [of devas] seems not to occur to him. The Sanskrit also differs from the Majjhima Nikāya version of the story. The parallel is found in the Aṅguttara Nikāya version. Here Sāriputta says to Udāyin:

idhāvuso, bhikkhu sīlasampanno samādhisampanno paññāsampanno saññāvedayitanirodhaṃ samāpajjeyyapi vuṭṭhaheyyapi – atthetaṃ ṭhānaṃ. No ce diṭṭheva dhamme aññaṃ ārādheyya, atikkammeva kabaḷiṃkārāhārabhakkhānaṃ devānaṃ sahabyataṃ aññataraṃ manomayaṃ kāyaṃ upapanno saññāvedayitanirodhaṃ samāpajjeyyāpi vuṭṭhaheyyāpi – atthetaṃ ṭhānan ti. (AN iii.192 etc).

Here, friends, it is possible that a bhikkhu accomplished in the threefold way of ethics, meditation and understanding, might enter and emerge from the cessation of mental activity and experience. But if he does not attain knowledge (aññā ārādheyya) in this life (ditthēva dhamme), [then] reborn amongst a certain mind-made group of devas who have transcended eating solid food, it is possible that he will attain and abandon the cessation of the cessation of mental activity and experience.

The two passages are very similar, one of the main differences is present verbs in Sanskrit (he attains and abandons) as opposed to optatives in Pali (he might attain and abandon). Note that Pali ārādheyya becomes "strangely distorted to ārāgayati" in Buddhist Sanskrit (PED sv. ārādheti). This means that vājñāmārāgayati is the same as Pali aññaṃ ārādheyya, i.e. vā ājñām ārāgayati (with the vā looking quite out of place). Without knowing this the Sanskrit is difficult to interpret. Also the idiom diṭṭhēva dhamme (Skt. dṛṣṭa eva dharme) means 'in this life', but is literally 'whose nature is visible'. It is the last statement that Udāyī (wrongly) disagrees with.

Later we have this passage relating to Kośa 3.40:

bhūtā hi tāvatsattvā upapannā iti vijñāyante | atha saṃbhavaiṣiṇaḥ katame |

It's understood that 'those who exist' (bhūtā) means beings (sattva) who have been reborn (upapanna). But what is the meaning of 'one seeking birth' (saṃbhavaiṣiṇaḥ)?

manomayaḥ saṃbhavaiṣī gandharvaś cāntarābhavaḥ nirvṛttiś ca || Kośa 3.40 ||

It means mind-made, a birth seeker, gandharva, in-between realm and arising .

In the Bhāṣya commentary on this Vasubandhu says:

sa eva manonirjātatvāt manomaya uktaḥ / śukraśoṇitādikaṃ kiñcid bāhyam anupādāya bhāvāt / [153]

It is called mind-made because of the state of coming forth (nirjāta) from the mind only; [and] because is exists without including anything exterior like semen (śukra), or blood (śoṇita) etc,

In other words the normal physical processes of sexual reproduction, as understood in 5th century Buddhist India, are not involved in the production manomaya kāya. Only the manas is involved. Vasubandhu also cites a Sanskrit counterpart of a familiar phrase from the Pali which describes devas, with some elaborations. It is sūtra uktaṃ'said in a sūtra':

"te bhavanti rūpiṇo manomayāḥ sarvāṅgapratyaṅgopetā āvikalā ahīnendriyāḥ śubhāvarṇasthāyinaḥ svayaṃprabhā vihāyasaṃgamāḥ prītibhakṣaḥ prītyāhārā dīrghāyuṣo dīrghamadhvānaṃ tiṣṭhantī"ti / [186|22-186|24]

They exist and remain with form, mind-made, with all their limbs, not crippled, with functioning senses, having a beautiful colour, self-radiant, they eat rapture and their food is rapture, and live a long time and breath sweetly for a long time.

Note that feeding on rapture (prīti-bhakṣa) contradicts the idea that beings in the antarābhava as gandharvas feed on odours (gandha), an idea that Vasubandhu comments on. I'll deal with this in a subsequent essay on the gandharva.

For Vasubandhu manomaya kāya refers first to a group of devas; and second to existence in the antarābhava. However he raises an interesting counterpoint to the insistence that manomayakāya is rūpin 'has form' or 'is material' by denying any association with the physical elements of reproduction. This complication turns out to be quite involved and is the main topic of Kritzer (2000). I'm planning a further exploration of arguments about antarābhava, especially from the point of view of the Mahāvibhāṣa (a Sarvāstivādin almanac) and will try to include some comments on this subject in that essay.

Asaṅga

Asaṅga is said to have been half brother to Vasubandhu and with him a co-founder of the Yogācara sect. However unlike Vasubandhu, Asaṅga is associated with the Mahīśāsaka sect, one of those which, according to Wayman (1974), rejected the idea of an antarābhava. I mentioned in the previous essay (Manomaya Kāya: Other Early Texts) that Asaṅga's Bodhisattvabhūmi took up the idea of bright and dark manomaya which we found first in the Ekottarāgama. In his Yogācarabhūmi (I 20.9-13) he clearly accepts antarābhava (as a result of conversion?):

tasya punaḥ paryāyā antarābhava ity ucyate maraṇabhavotpattibhavayor antarāle prādurbhāvāt | gandharva ity ucyate gamanād gandhena puṣṭitaś ca | manomaya ity ucyate tannisritya manasa upapatty-āyatana-gamanatayā | śarīragatyā ca punar nālambanagatyā | (Wayman 1974: 238 n.30)

There is another way of putting it. 'Inbetween-state' is said because it appears in the space between (antara-ala) the death state (maraṇa-bhava) and the rebirth state (utpatti-bhava). We say 'gandharva' because it proceeds and grows by odours (gandha). It is called 'made of mind' because relying on itself, the manas goes to the sphere of rebirth and the body-function is not the former object of perception.

Tantra

There is an early Tantric myth which claims that , prior to becoming a Buddha, Siddhārtha ascended to Akaniṣṭha heaven in a manomayakāya in order to receive abhiseka. Ferdinand & Wayman (1978). For example in the Sarvatathāgata-tattvasaṃgraha (ca 700 CE), Śākyamuni, while still a bodhisattva of the tenth stage, went in his manomayakāya to Akaniṣṭha, the abode of Vairocana (Almogi 2009: 78). Akaniṣṭha becomes the place where all Buddha's go to become enlightened. The idea that Buddhas have to go to Akaniṣṭha to become awakened occurs already in the Laṅka:

kāmadhātau tathārūpye na vai buddho vibudhyate |
rūpadhātvakaniṣṭheṣu vītarāgeṣu budhyate || 10.774 ||

The awakened is not awakened in the sense-realm or the formless realm;
He is awakened amongst the desireless [devas] of Akaniṣṭha in the form-realm.

However this verse sits in a jumble of unrelated verses and it's not clear what the context is, or how this was understood and used by the author(s). It may be that this is a comment on the kind of practices that one can/may do: rūpa being associated with dhyāna and arūpa with the arūpāyatanas.

Conclusions

The divide that we see in early Buddhism with respect to antarābhava and how this influences the understanding of manomayakāya, is still visible in Mahāyāna texts. Quite a few of the Mahāyāna texts that are popular in modern Buddhism appear to take manomaya to be part of the psycho-cosmology: it relates devas and meditators in heavenly states. The main line of development of the antarābhava idea (and manomayakāya as the form we take there) is associated with Yogācara śāstra literature, rather than with sūtras.

As pointed out in the previous essay, the development of the idea of manomaya kāya seems to go like this:

Devas in the rūpadhātu are a manomaya (ni)kāya (group).
Meditators in the fourth jhāna magically create (abhinir√mā) a manomaya kāya (body) which is rūpin (out-of-body experiences?)
Non-returners (anāgāmin) transitioning from the kāmadhātu to the rūpadhātu do so in a manomaya kāya (body).
The advent of antarābhava leads to all beings having (or "riding") a manomaya kāyain the interim between death and rebirth.
Antarābhava and manomayakāya are equated, along with gandharva.

As Mahāyāna Buddhists continued to develop their ideas, over centuries, a number of other innovations were proposed, e.g. an ethicized manomayakāya (bright and dark) or the three varieties in the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra, but most of these do not seem to have had much influence outside their own milieu.

In this survey we got a tiny glimpse into the problem of what is meant by manomayakāya. An object that is made by the mind (-maya) is one that is created by the process of abhi-nir√mā. This root in Pali takes the (3rd person singular) form: abhinimmināti; however it can be conjugated several ways in Sanskrit: abhinirmiṇoti (5th class) -mimīte (3rd class ātmanepada) -mimāti (3rd class parasmaipada). According to PED it means to create or fashion, by means of magic. The Critical Pali Dictionary (sv. abhi-nimmināti) qualifies this as "to create (mostly by magic)." In his Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Dictionary, Edgerton makes a distinction between abhinirmiṇoti and nirmiṇoti suggesting that magic is a feature only of the latter. However in his examples he does associate magic with the present passive participle abhinirmimīyantaṃ "being magically created". Monier-Williams only lists the past participle and his entry merely reads "made, created". The word appears not to be listed in Apte.

Despite the suggestion of magical creation, the kāya that is made by the mind is not ontologically distinguished from caturmahābhūtamaya kāya (a body made of the four major elements). This is an important point for other arguments about Buddhist philosophy. Even the Buddhists who adopted this idea of a manomaya kāya and developed it did not succumb to ontological dualism. The point here is that the identification of the Buddhist manomaya kāya with the Hindu 'subtle body' (liṅga śarīra or sūkṣma śarīra) is a mistake precisely because the Hindu subtle body is explicitly made from different stuff than the material body, despite Hindus using the term manomaya in their doctrine of subtle bodies, they mean something different by it. It shows the dangers of carelessly adopting the terminology of popular culture. The manomaya kāya is never referred to as sūkṣma'subtle' (or 'tiny, fine, thin, intangible' etc). In short there is no entity in Buddhism that is comparable to the Hindu subtle body as transmigrating entity.

Those sects which accept the antarābhava seem to have employed the existing idea of manomaya and particularly a kāya qua body that is mind-made, to try explain the state of being in the interim between death and rebirth. Buddhists already treated life as the interval between birth and death so there is a certain symmetry to this view, which might have had aesthetic appeal. Despite the mutually exclusive conclusions they come to, Buddhist groups were open to, or even actively casting about for, metaphysical ideas to help them create a coherent system of thought from the tradition they received. This intellectual effort went on for a millennia at least.

In the previous essays I've mentioned another related concept drawn from Vedic religion, i.e. the gandharva. A complete description of the Buddhist afterlife requires that we try to understand the gandharva. Some Buddhist traditions unite the three concepts of antarābhava, manomaya kāya and gandharva in the sense that a being in the antarābhava is a gandharva with a manomaya kāya. Thus the next essay in this series will look at the gandharva.

~~oOo~~

Other essays on manomaya kāya:

Manomaya Kāya: Other Early Texts (12 Dec 2014)
Manomaya Kāya: Pali Texts (5 Dec 2014)
Manomaya: Background to Mind-Made Bodies (28 Nov 2014)

Bibliography

Almogi, Orna (2009) Rong-zom-pa’s Discourses on Buddhology: A Study of Various Conceptions of Buddhahood in Indian Sources with Special Reference to the Controversy Surrounding the Existence of Gnosis (jñāna: ye shes) as Presented by the Eleventh-Century Tibetan Scholar Rong-zom Chos-kyi-bzang-po. [Studia Philologica Buddhica Monograph Series XXIV] Tokyo, The International Institute for Buddhist Studies of The International College for Postgraduate Buddhist Studies.

Aurobindo (2004) The Upanishads: Kena and other Upanishads. Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Dept.

Bucknell, Roderick S. (2011) ‘The Historical Relationship Between the Two Chinese Saṃyuktāgama Translations.’ Chung-Hwa Buddhist Journal. 24:35-70.

Dharmachakra Translation Committee. (2013) The Play in Full: Lalitavistara. [Ārya-lalitavistara-nāma-mahāyāna-sūtra] http://read.84000.co/browser/released/UT22084/046/UT22084-046-001.pdf

Ferdinand D. Lessing and Alex Wayman, trans. Introduction to the Buddhist Tantric Systems. (Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass., 1978), pp. 26-27.

Jones, J J. (1949) The Mahāvastu. Vol. 1 Luzac. https://archive.org/stream/sacredbooksofbud16londuoft#page/286/mode/2up

Kritzer, Robert. 'Rūpa and the antarābhava.'Journal of Indian Philosophy 28:235-272.

Lee, Sumi. (2008) 'The Philosophical Meaning of Manomaya-kāya.'2008 Korean Conference of Buddhist Studies. http://www.skb.or.kr/down/papers/129.pdf [pages not numbered]

Lee, Sumi. (2014) 'The Meaning of ‘Mind-made Body’ (S. manomaya-kāya, C. yisheng shen 意生身) in Buddhist Cosmological and Soteriological systems'. Buddhist Studies Review. 31(1): 65-90.

Pruden, Leo M, trans. (1988). Abhidharmakośabhāṣyam. [English translation from the French by Louis de La Vallée Poussin]. Asian Humanities Press.

Radich, Michael David. (2007) The Somatics of Liberation: Ideas about Embodiment in Buddhism from Its Origins to the Fifth Century C.E. [PhD. Dissertation]. https://www.academia.edu.

Senart, Émile. (1897) Mahavastu-Avadana. 3 vols., Paris 1882-1897. http://gretil.sub.uni-goettingen.de/gretil/1_sanskr/4_rellit/buddh/mhvastuu.htm

Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro. (1930) Studies in the Lankavatara Sutra. Routledge.

Tripathi, Chandra Bhal (1995) Ekottarāgama-Fragmente der Gilgit-Handschrift, Reinbek 1995 (Studien zur Indologie und Iranistik, Monographie 2). http://gretil.sub.uni-goettingen.de/gretil/1_sanskr/4_rellit/buddh/ekottaru.htm

Vaidya, P. L. (1963) Saddharmalaṅkāvatārasūtram. The Mithila Institute of Post-Graduate Studies and Research in Sanskrit Learning. Darbhanga.

Wayman, Alex (1974) 'The Intermediate-State Dispute in Buddhism' in Buddhists Studies in Honour of I. B. Horner. D Reidel: 227-239.

1st folio of EAP 676/2/5.
For hi-res visit EAP

I made a surprise return to the world of manuscripts and the Heart Sutra this week. On Monday I saw a tweet that told me the British Library had uploaded images of more than 200 Buddhist Sanskrit manuscripts (in fact some of them are not Buddhist, but that's another story). The collection in question is called: Survey of Buddhist Sanskrit manuscripts in the possession of Vajrayana Viharas and Newar Buddhist families in Lalitpur in the Kathmandu valley, Nepal (EAP676). I scanned through the titles, not expecting anything very interesting but came across this:

EAP676/2/5: Ārya Pañcaviṁśatikā Prajñāpāramitā Mantranāma Dhāraṇī.

Now. Pañcaviṁśatikā Prajñāpāramitā is Sanskrit for the 25,000 line Perfection of Wisdom, literally it is The Perfection of Wisdom which is 25,000-fold. Not 'verses', note, since only one Prajñāpāramitā text is in verse, the Ratnaguṇasamcayagāthā, and it is not referred by the number of verses. These texts with numbers in their names are all in prose and the number of lines they take up depends on the length of the line and the handwriting of the scribe. What really peaked my interest is the last word, dhāraṇī, because the Heart Sutra is sometimes referred to in Nepalese manuscripts as the dhāraṇī of the Pañcaviṁśatikā Prajñāpāramitā.

Bhujimol Script.
(mantra begins on line 4)

This text is in Bhujimol Script which is one of the Nepalese 'hooked' scripts - they have a curl on top instead of a line. I have learned this before, even have read the Heart Sutra in Sanskrit in this script (one of the Cambridge Manuscripts) so I could make out enough of it to be confident that it was a long-text Heart Sutra. I set about transcribing the whole text and then comparing it to Conze's critical edition (both his selected text and variations). Since this manuscript is in a private collection in Nepal I thought it unlikely that Conze could have seen this one or used it in his edition. And this turns out to be the case. This manuscript has not been studied before to the best of my knowledge.

The manuscript is in reasonably good state of preservation, the paper is not blemished, mouldy or torn. There is some smudging of ink, but for the most part even the smudged akṣaras are readable. A quick note about the word akṣara. This word refers to a unit of Indic writing. In this type of text akṣara are not written joined up, each stands alone, meaning there are no word breaks. An akṣara represents a graphic unit rather than a spoken syllable, usually a single vowel, or one or more consonants followed by a vowel (we say pad ma, but write pa dma). Since each akṣara is a single graphic unit they are often called 'letters' though I think this is also imprecise. I favour using the Sanskrit term since it is more precise. A few akṣaras in our text are difficult to read because of the handwriting, or smudging, but can be inferred from the context and what remains on the page. Only one akṣara was completely un-guessable, since it is both obscure and seems to have been added by the scribe in error and is out of context. Some marks on the paper appear to have been deliberate, but are of uncertain meaning or function.

Regards the title I find I disagree with the catalogue record. The text's colophon - the source of the title of a Sanskrit ms, reads:

| āryyapañcaviṃśatika prajñāpāramitā samāptaḥ |

Given the huge numbers of omissions I think it reasonable to conjecture an omitted word between prajñāpāramitā and samāptaḥ, namely hṛdaya. This occurs in almost all of the other manuscripts. Most importantly nowhere on the manuscript is the title: Ārya Pañcaviṁśatikā Prajñāpāramitā Mantranāma Dhāraṇī (nor does Conze list this precise variant in any of his witnesses). My title for the work would be Ārya-pañcaviṃśatika-prajñāpāramitā-hṛdaya. Though many of the other Nepalese mss. do refer to the text as a dhāraṇī, and it's very common to find it written along with the Uṣṇīṣavijaya Dhāraṇī.

The text is highly error ridden and there would be no point simply sharing an unedited transcription, so I have produced a diplomatic edition. I have commented on the text at more than 140 places, which means on average I have commented on one word in two: a remarkable level of corruption given the supposedly sacred nature of the text. Some errors seem to have been introduced by the scribe. For example the sibilants (ś ṣ s) are frequently mixed up; l and r are exchanged without pattern; anusvāra (ṃ) and visarga (ḥ) are added and subtracted without pattern. Another regular error in this ms. is vya for ve. This kind of error is corrected in my edition. Nepalese manuscripts also regularly write sattva as satva, and have ryya for rya and rvva for rva, though EAP676/2/5 is inconsistent. These errors are not corrected, since they appear to be features rather than bugs. Word endings also vary without pattern and these have been normalised, following Conze 1967. Occasionally extra syllables have been added, and at one point a phrase seems to be copied twice (the scribe's eye may have drifted between lines). These appear in my edition with a strike-through. More often syllables, words and phrases have been omitted. All changes have been noted.

Of course it's possible that our scribe was simply copying a manuscript that was already corrupt. Thus these scribal errors can become generational. These types of errors become apparent when comparing many mss. And they help to establish relatedness amongst manuscripts. If two mss. have the same scribal error, the chances are they were copied from a single mss. which contained that error. We presume that the regular doubling of yya in ārya was an early scribal error that has since been propagated across Nepal as a feature.

One thing to note in comparing any text to Conze's critical edition, is that he sometimes simply ignores witnesses that are very corrupt even though he lists them as variations. I have found about half a dozen omissions great and small to date. As such, his critical notes are incomplete to an unknown degree, and unreliable.

Some of the changes are not errors but editorial decisions. For example the usual way of saying "at that time" is tasmin samaye in the locative case. This is also seen in the phrase ekasmin samaye'at one time". In the first para, after the Buddha goes into samādhi, Avalokiteśvara becomes the main protagonist and he is introduced using tena samayena which also means 'at that time' but uses the instrumental case. However in EAP676/2/5 some previous editor has changed this back into the locative. Such changes are not 'corrected' except where a scribal error has crept in. This change is also seen in a number of mss., using Conze's enumeration: Nd, Ne, Ni and Nm. Thus when we come to try to figure out the lineage of all the surviving mss., something I hope to do some day, then we'd expect these mss. that share this feature to be more closely related to each other than to other mss. Similarly for the idiom "tasmāc chāriputra" This spelling comes from the action of sandhi rules on the two words tasmāt śāriputra. Our text prefers tasmāt tarhi kulaputra or tasmāt tarhi śāriputra. This kind of change couldn't be the ms. equivalent of a typo. Someone must have decided this was "better". In this our text is like about half of the Nepalese mss., and the Tibetan. Conze's reference to the Tibetan is to a single unnamed source. As Jonathan Silk has shown two distinct recensions with many variations exist in printed editions of the Tibetan canon. Thus in comparing the texts we'd have to use Silk's critical edition of the Tibetan to see which recension our text is like.

Despite the sheer weight of errors and editorial changes in this text we still ought to be able to show how it relates to other texts. The generational scribal errors and editorial changes are like a DNA finger-print for the texts. However it's already clear that EAP676/2/5 is not linearly related to any of the other Heart Sutra mss. It sometimes follows one, and at other times another. The relationship between the Nepalese manuscripts appears to be complex. And EAP676/2/5 also has some unique features. For example in the Heart Sutra mantra the scribe writes gate 2 to indicate gate gate. This appears to be a unique feature amongst Conze's witnesses. The mantra itself gives us some sense of the level of corruption. As written it is:

| auṃ gate 2 pāraṃgate pārasaṃgate bodhi~~satva~~ svāhā |

Note that auṃ is unusual in a Buddhist ms. In the second mantra (see below) we have the usual oṃ. Perhaps the scribe was used to seeing auṃ and we might conjecture that they also copy Hindu texts. I've put a strike through akṣaras added in error. The misplacing of anusvāra (ṃ) is a feature of these mss. They are added and subtracted seemingly at random. The scribe has added -satva to bodhi. This mistake is not found in other Heart Sutra mss.

Another unique feature of this ms. is that it is followed by another mantra in Lantsa or Ranjana script, by what appears to be the same scribe (it's difficult to tell). The mantra is introduced with an invocation of Avalokiteśvara and I was able to locate the exact mantra in the Sādhanamālā. This section also uses the numeral 2 to indicate repetition, and most of the numerals are surmounted by a chandra-bindu.

|| oṃ nāma śrī āryyāvvalokiteśvarāya bodhisatvāya mahāsatvāya mahākāruṇikāya | tadyathā | oṃ cala 2 cili 2 culu 2 hulu 2 mulu 2 huṃ huṃ huṃ huṃ huṃ phaṭ phaṭ phaṭ phaṭ phaṭ padmahastaya svāhā ༔ || iti āryyamokṣamantra nāma dhāraṇi samāptam | ༓ | ༓ |

A text like this was unlikely to have been made to be read. If it was the reader would be left very confused. Instead it was most likely produced as a act of merit by a pious Buddhist. Professional scribes churn these auspicious objects out and while we assume they do not deliberately make mistakes, neither are they checking for errors or making corrections. The manuscript might also be an object of worship. The dhāraṇī, like it's early predecessor the parittā, is a form of apotropaic magic and possession of such an object no doubt protects the holder (other Mahāyāna texts make this function of the text explicit by promising protection to anyone who would recite or copy the text). On the other hand it's entirely possible that the patron and/or the scribe had memorised the text and used it in their daily practice. Chanting in Sanskrit or Pali, by devotees who know nothing of the language, is a feature of Buddhist liturgy.

The edition with footnotes is available from my website: EAP676-diplo-edition.pdf. This is still a draft, since no one else has yet looked at it. It's painstaking, fiddly work and, ironically, errors are easily overlooked.

If nothing else this shows the value of putting manuscripts online. They become available to a much broader range of people - including feral scholars such as myself. High quality scans mean I never have to touch the fragile ms. itself and risk further damaging it. I can see everything I need to sitting at my desk. With larger manuscripts there is no longer a risk of mixing up leaves. I've spent a happy week examining this text. I'm grateful to everyone involved in putting this manuscript online, especially the British Library Endangered Archives Project and the owner of the ms. Shanker Thapa.

My other Heart Sutra essays, some graphics and my working bibliography are listed here (or under the tab at the top of the page).

~~oOo~~

Thanks for reading and all the best for 2015.

Action at a Temporal Distance in the Theravāda

Placing the Heart in Indo-European

The Politics of Evolution and Modernist Buddhism.

Living in a Non-Utopian Universe

Cemetery Practice

Crossing the Line Between Death and Life

The Nature of Reality?

Evolution, Depression and Suicide.

The Second "Hidden" Kātyāyana Sūtra in Chinese

Anicca, Dukkha, Anattā

When Did Language Evolve?

A Library is My Temple

Why I am Not a Feminist.

Arguments For and Against Antarābhava.

Common Credulity

Manomaya: Background to Mind-Made Bodies.

Manomaya Kāya: Pali texts

Manomaya Kāya: Other Early Texts

Manomayakāya: Mahāyāna Sources

New Heart Sutra Manuscript