a gandharva serenades  Brahmā

Gandharvas play two distinct roles in Buddhist metaphysics. They are firstly minor gods usually depicted as musicians and secondly they are supposedly involved in human conception. Those Buddhists who believed in an antarābhava, or interim realm, adopted the idea of the gandharva (Pali gandhabba) as the form beings take in the antarābhava, though this bears no relation to the celestial musician. Those who did not believe still shoehorned the gandharva into the rebirth process, but were much more vague about what they meant. This essay and the next will summarise and critique some research into the history of the idea of gandharva with respect to the antarābhava. 

gandharvó apsú ápiyā ca yóṣāsā́
no nā́bhiḥ paramáṃ jāmí tán nau

The gandharva and the maiden in the waters,
Is our supreme origin, that is our relationship.

parjányavr̥ddham mahiṣáṃ
táṃ sū́ryasya duhitā́bharat
táṃ gandharvā́ḥ práty agr̥bhṇan
táṃ sóme rásam ā́dadhur
índrāyendo pári srava

The buffalo raised by Parjanya (God of rain),
It was brought by the daughter of Sūrya (the sun);
The gandharvas have received it,
Placed the juice in Soma.
O drop, flow for Indra.

pataṃgó vā́cam mánasā bibharti
tā́ṃ gandharvó avadad gárbhe antáḥ
tā́ṃ dyótamānāṃ svaríyam manīṣā́m
r̥tásya padé kaváyo ní pānti || 10.177.2 ||

The bird carries speech in its mind,
The gandharva spoke that inside the womb;
That revelation shining like the sun,
The poets guard as a sign of cosmic order.

Anālayo. (2008) 'Rebirth and the gandhabba.'Journal of Buddhist Studies 1: 91-105. Republished by Anālayo with corrections of publishing errors: http://www.buddhismuskunde.uni-hamburg.de/fileadmin/pdf/analayo/RebirthGandhabba.pdf

Cuevas, Bryan Jaré. (1996). 'Predecessors and Prototypes: Towards a Conceptual History of the Buddhist Antarabhava.' Numen 43(3): 263-302.

Doniger, Wendy O'Flaherty. (1981) The Rig Veda: An Anthology. Penguin. 

Dumézil, Georges. (1948) Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on Two Indo-European Representations of Sovereignty. (Translated by Derek Coltman 1988). Zone Books. https://archive.org/details/Mitra-varunaAnEssayOnTwoIndo-europeanRepresentationsOfSovereignty

Eggeling, Julius. (1885), Satapatha Brahmana Part II (Sacred Books of the East; 26), at sacred-texts.com 

Gombrich, Richard (2009). What the Buddha Thought. Equinox. 

Hopkins, Edward Washburn. (1968) Epic Mythology. Biblo & Tannen. 

Mahony, William K. (1998) The Artful Universe: An Introduction to the Vedic Religious Imagination. SUNY Press. 

Panaino, Antonio. (2012) 'Gaṇdarǝba.'Encyclopaedia Iranica. Vol. X, Fasc. 3, pp. 267-269. http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/gandareba-

Pokorny, Julius (1959) Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Bern: Francke, 1989. Adapted online: http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/ielex/

Sutherland, Gail Hinich, (1991) The Disguises of the Demon: The Development of the Yaksa in Hinduism and Buddhism. SUNY press.

Wijesekere, O. H. De A. (1945) 'Vedic Gandharva and the Pali Gandhabba.'University of Ceylon Review. 3(1) April: 73-107.

Wilson, Horace Hayman  (1840). The Vishnu Purana. http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/vp/vp039.htm 

Witzel, Michael (1999) 'Substrate Languages in Old Indo-Aryan (Rigvedic, Middle and Late Vedic).' Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies 5(1). http://www.ejvs.laurasianacademy.com/ejvs0501/ejvs0501article.pdf

In part one of this two-part essay we explored parts of the Brahmanical literature—i.e. the Vedas, Epics and Purāṇas—looking for precedents that might explain the dual nature of the gandharva in Buddhist literature. What we found, with some difficulty, was that precedents do exist in the Epic and Purāṇic texts, but that these only relate to the gandharva qua minor god, especially as celestial musician, and not to any role in conception. Despite the enthusiasm of modern commentators for imagining connections, it seems that the gandharva's role in conception is a Buddhist innovation with no roots in the existing mythology of India. Thus we will have to look closely at the textual tradition to see if we can say why such an innovation was necessary and why it took the form it did. 

Note that in Pali the word is spelled gandhabba (Sanskrit rva regularly becomes assimilated to Pali bba). I'll use the Pali when specifically referring to Pali texts, but the Sanskrit for other purposes.

Tiṇṇaṃ kho pana, bhikkhave, sannipātā gabbhassāvakkanti hoti... Yato ca kho, bhikkhave, mātāpitaro ca sannipatitā honti, mātā ca utunī hoti, gandhabbo ca paccupaṭṭhito hoti

Bhikkhus, when three come together there is entry of the embryo (gabbha)... and they are: the mother and father come together; the mother is in season; and a gandhabba is present.

復次三事合會入於母胎，父母聚集一處、母滿精堪耐、香陰已至。
(T 1.26 769.b23-4)

Furthermore, three items combine to enter a woman's womb. Father and mother must come together in one place; the mother is fully able and ready to bear [a child]; a gandharva has already arrived.

‘Viññāṇapaccayā nāmarūpa’nti iti kho panetaṃ vuttaṃ... Viññāṇañca hi, ānanda, mātukucchismiṃ na okkamissatha, api nu kho nāmarūpaṃ mātukucchismiṃ samuccissathā ti? No hetaṃ, bhante.

I have said that viññāṇa is the condition for nāmarūpa... for if, Ānanda, there was no descent of viññāṇa into the mother's belly, could nāmarūpa be produced in there? Indeed not, Sir.

tadevidaṃ viññāṇaṃ sandhāvati saṃsarati, anaññan ti

It is just this viññāṇa and nothing else which runs through, and goes around [saṃsāra].

Yvāyaṃ, bhante, vado vedeyyo tatra tatra kalyāṇapāpakānaṃ kammānaṃ vipākaṃ paṭisaṃvedetī ti

It is that, sir, which speaks and feels, that which experiences the good and bad consequences of actions.

gandharva ity ucyate gandena gamanād gandhena puṣṭaś ca |

It's called 'gandharva' because it moves by means of odours (gandha) and is satisfied by odours.

Disputes about how karma works are almost as old as Buddhism itself. Some epic intellectual battles were fought over it in India. The one thing that everyone in ancient India agreed on, was that karma as it is presented in the Early Buddhist texts did not work. The first iterations of Buddhist karma are inconsistent and incoherent. With no scriptural authority it was up to sects or even individuals  to work out their own ideas. Sometimes the disputes became quite heated. Vaibhāṣika expert Saṅghabadhra refers to his opponent Vasubandhu as, "that man whose theories have the coherence of the cries of a mad deaf-mute in a fever-dream." (cited in Anacker 1972: 252)

1. mental activity can only happen one citta at a time, though each citta may be accompanied by a number of concomitant cetāsikas.
2. The present citta is conditioned by the immediately past citta, and is a condition for the subsequent citta. 
3. Cittas can be either kuśala, akuśala or avyākata (wholesome, unwholesome, indeterminate)
4. A kuśala citta cannot directly follow an akuśala citta and vice versa.

We can diagram these axioms like this (below). The diagram shows that the result is a highly linear, serial process, with no provision for branching or changing the nature of the sequence.

These axioms do not all derive from experience. Meditators report that in the rarefied mental activity of samādhi, mental events appear to occur one at a time, although what applies to an altered state of consciousness does not automatically apply to ordinary waking consciousness. And what presents itself to awareness is not the whole of our minds. The axioms about conditions and sequence, by contrast, are a priori abstract principles which reflect theories about how the mind ought to work, but which are opaque to experience. Like ancient Indian knowledge of human physiology, these early attempts at psychology have mainly historical interest. Here, however we will attempt to take Buddhist arguments on their own terms. We are not subjecting ancient knowledge to modern validity criteria in this essay (I will be doing so in the next essay). In this essay we will stipulate these axioms and work through the logical implications of them.

Explanations of karma are overwhelmingly presented in terms of a simplified model in which there is a single karma giving rise to a single stream of cittas and a single result.† It is assumed that the model will naturally scale up and remain valid, though as I will show below this assumption breaks down as soon as we consider more than one karma. Sometimes an allowance is made for the accumulation of karmas, but even then the model is presented in such a way as to imply that the process is simple. We will begin with the simplest case and see where it leads.

Let us say that karma_a produces citta_a1, and then, in series, citta_a2, citta_a3 up to citta_a(n), where 'n' can be any number. The final citta_a(n) in the sequence, at time n, can be understood in two ways. Firstly it might be just another of the same kind of citta as all the previous cittas and we can see it as exhausting the last of the momentum of the karma. Secondly it might be that citta_a1 up to citta_a(n-1) are just placeholders (vasana) with no real world effects and all of the consequences are bound up in the arising of citta_a(n) which delivers the full impact of the karma. We take this to be true, for example, for all those karmas which contribute to rebirth, but do not have other consequences. Variations on both options have been adopted by different schools and almost all explanations of karma adopt some variation on this model.

A Two Karma System.

Consider what happens if we perform karma_b and set off a new stream, citta_b, while the citta_a stream is still active. Here we are assuming that we can ignore all other mental activity for the sake of argument, though this would not be a valid assumption, we will address this below. If, according to axiom 1, we can only experience one citta at a time, then the a. and b. streams of cittas must find a way to share our minds. The most efficient way of doing this would be to alternate a1, b1, a2, b2... and so on. In this case, however, it would not be possible to argue that the stream of a cittas still forms an unbroken conditional sequence: citta_a2 is not longer a direct condition for citta_a3 because citta_b2 has intervened. Therefore the model violates axiom 2 and has already broken down. It is vital for karma theory that no other citta intervenes in the conditioned process or the continuity is lost. The Theory of Karma does not survive scaling up from one to two active karmas. 

© 2006 by Sidney Harris

We might propose that the mind has a way of keeping track of different streams so that alternating cittas is allowed. This is not a very good argument. First, because it is ad hoc, i.e.  an arbitrary adjustment in response to a problem rather than emerging naturally from the parameters of the model. Second, because it introduces a black-box to the process, i.e. a complex mechanism that we can not see or understand, but which magically produces the precise result we need to save our theory. The black-box amounts to "then a miracle occurs" in the cartoon. Unfortunately Buddhist philosophy, especially karma theory, is very reliant of ad hoc rules and black-box processes.

For the sake of argument let us accept this possibility that the mind somehow keeps track of streams of cittas from different karmas (keeping in mind that we have accepted an unlikely and weak argument). What if karma_a is kuśala and karma_b is akuśala? The result would be alternating kuśala and akuśala cittas, which is forbidden by axiom 4. The Theravādins considered this possibility and added an ad hoc rule that if a kuśala citta is in danger of being followed by an akuśala citta then a non-sensory resting-state (bhavaṅga) citta must intervene. Bhavaṅga cittas are avyākata. Unfortunately, as the Sarvāstivādins pointed out, this was not a solution to the problem because there's no more reason to accept that an avyākata citta can follow a kuśala citta, than to accept that an akuśala citta can. The axiom boils down to "like follows like" and thus the ad hoc interposition of bhavaṅga citta is not a solution, because avyākata is unlike either kuśala or akuśala. So even if the mind can keep track of cittas associated with different karmas, there is no way to accommodate axiom 4. But without axiom 4, karma becomes incoherent: results might end up being unlike their conditions.

The Sautrāntikas also saw this problem. Their solution was to propose that karmas did not produce active cittas until the final moment in time when the karma manifested its results. Until that point the effects of the karma existed only in potential form (vasana), like a seed (bīja). Just as a seed only germinates when there is warmth and water, karma only ripens when the conditions are right. This agricultural metaphor was enormously popular in ancient India and is invoked in all kinds of contexts. Here it amounts to an ad hoc, black-box rationalisation. It begs many questions, not least of which is, if the karma is a metaphorical seed, then what is the metaphorical granary in which it is stored? There is no existing category of process or entity which has this kind of function so yet another ad hoc addition must be made to the theory. Early Buddhism seems to have lacked the metaphor: THE MIND IS A CONTAINER. Early Buddhists also treated mental activity as an entirely transient (anitya) phenomenon, and had a well developed critique of any entity which was considered to persist beyond the existence of the conditions for its existence. There was nowhere to store karma.

The ideal of a "potential citta" is deeply problematic. How does it exist beyond the conditions which gave rise to it (specifically the karma)? How can it have no real-world effects and then at the last moment suddenly have a real world effect? How does it know when to become active? If an entity has no real world effects, how does the real world have effects on it to make it ripen? Many Buddhists were content to have an apposite metaphor, but a metaphor is not an explanation, and in this case the metaphor explains nothing.

The passive/active distinction ought, by extension of axiom 4, prevent one from producing the other because active and passive cittas must be different by nature (svabhāva, used in the earlier sense of defining characteristic). This problem is solved in some karma theories by the ad hoc addition of another kind of conditionality. This special form of conditionality allows a potential-type citta to give rise to an active-type citta (we experience the latter as vedanā, but not the former). In Theravāda theory there is a special ad hoc category of mental activity which occurs at only at the moment of death (cuticitta) and performs the black-box function of transmitting, instantaneously across any intervening space, all of the information about our active karma-processes to the being experiencing punarbahava, via another ad hoc category—relinking mental activity (paṭisandhicitta)—so that the baby is conceived and born in a realm appropriate to the actions of the deceased. Those who believed in an antarābhava argued that crossing space takes time, and described an interim between death and rebirth (I have discussed at length in previous essays). The antarābhava is one massive ad hoc black-box add-on to karma theory, whose main purpose was to explain how karma survives death.

Amongst those who did not go down the 'series of cittas' route of solving the problems associated with karma the most prominent are the Vaibhāṣikas. The Vaibhāṣikas earned their nickname, Sarvāstivāda, because they proposed that a dharma (a broader category that includes citta) caused by a karma, exists and is efficacious as a condition affecting both mind and body only in the present, but beyond the present it exists in a form that can only be perceived by the mind as a resultant citta (this axiom replaces axiom 2). Thus they argued (vāda) that dharmas always exist (sarva-asti), but are only sometimes effective. Arguments immediate sprang up about what was meant by "the present". Like the Sautrāntikas, the Sarvāstivādins have not solved the problem, they have only shunted it down the track a little. The sarva-asti-vāda does not explain how dharmas remain inactive for long periods of time until fruition. The most pertinent response came from Nāgārjuna, who complained that any dharma that did not cease when the conditions for it ceased violated the more fundamental principle of conditionality. In the formula imasmiṃ sati idaṃ hoti... imassa nirodhā idaṃ nirujjhati, when the condition ceases the effect must also cease. Thus anything caused by a karma that persists after the karma has ceased is tantamount to a permanently existing entity. It was presumably this logic that sent the Theravādins and others down the route of a series of cittas.

Nāgārjuna's own solution is that actor, karma, vipāka and sufferer are all just illusions: there are just flows of phenomena, and entities are like foam on water etc. On a relative level (saṃvṛti-satya) we see entities as existing, but at the ultimate level (paramārtha-satya) they do not exist (aka The Two truths). This highly abstract approach to karma satisfies many of the objections we've seen, but as Nāgārjuna's critics pointed out, on the basis of his own favourite text (Kātyāyana Sūtra), to argue that these things don't exist is no more appropriate than arguing that they always exist. Buddhaghosa agreed to some extent that no actor, but only actions could be found. What neither man managed to explain, was how morality made any sense whatever in an illusory world, filled with illusory 'beings', doing illusory actions, and reaping illusory consequences. Such a world is simply nonsensical and Nāgārjuna seems to have lost the argument over karma in pretty short order, so that despite the persistence of Madhyamaka sects into the present, most Mahāyāna Buddhists do not cite Nāgārjuna as an authority on karma, they cite Vasubandhu. 

Vasubandhu is responsible for the most famous of all ad hoc black-boxes in Buddhist, the 'storehouse' for storing karmic potential: the ālayavijñāna. Commentators seem to think that Vasubandhu himself, following his Sautrāntika inspirations, considered the ālayavijñāna as a metaphor, but apparently his successors hypostatised the metaphor and came to believe that it represented an entity. As an entity it breaks the fundamental Buddhist axiom disallowing permanent entities. Even as a metaphor it fails, precisely because it is ad hoc and a black box, and as such explains nothing. The ālayavijñāna comes to be associated with tathāgatagarbha, which quite openly equated with ātman in some late Buddhist texts. And thus some Buddhists simply capitulated to the need for an enduring entity to make sense of karma and the afterlife, despite the deep contradictions entailed. We've seen that such is also the case for arguments about the interim realm (antarābhava), mind-made bodies (manomayakāya) and gandharvas.


Multiple Karma Systems

However, so far we have only talked about a system of two citta streams. Consider that in each moment we are capable of forming an intention and acting. Theoretically we are capable of 1000s of karmas in an hour, 10's of 1000s in a day, and millions in a year. Of course not every action is karmic, and we don't produce karmas in every moment. Many moments are taken up with vipāka rather than karma. But potentially we can produce many millions of karmas across a life-time, most of which persist until our death when they exhaust themselves as conditions for a new being. It is very likely that an adult human will have millions of concurrent karma-initiated citta-streams operating at any given time.

In this diagram a new karma is successively added after the second moment of each citta stream. Each stream must continue to generate new cittas of the same kind in a connected stream, but in order that all the streams can be accommodated they occur in the mind in an arbitrary sequence. Because each citta is a condition for the next, it's less and less likely that the subsequent citta will be in the same stream and not a parallel stream. The sequence here is:

In order to work out the precedence and order of cittas demanded by this situation (which is forced on us by the axioms of karma) we would have to add more ad hoc rules, since there is no order inherent in the model (the order shown above is entirely arbitrary).

In a two citta system the time duration between cittas of the same stream doubles (on average). From citta_a1 to citta_a2 is on average two moments. For every new karma we add to the model, the time between two cittas of the same stream increases geometrically. If a million karmas were active, which is easily conceivable, then the average time between moments of the same citta-stream would be a million moments. Depending on how we count moments this might be as long as two weeks, and the chances of two cittas related to the same karma occurring in succession would one in a million. If there are two weeks and a 999,999 other cittas between two cittas of the same stream, then their relationship as conditioner/conditioned has become purely notional. And, as Nāgārjuna correctly points out, any delay might as well be forever, because it violates pratītyasamutpāda.

Imagine a mind in which millions streams of cittas were competing to manifest: the result would surely be random mental activity with no relation to what was happening in the present. The world would be utterly confusing, since very few of our cittas could possibly relate to present sense experience. Everything would be disjointed. It would be impossible to make sense of the world, or for the contents of our minds to consistently reflect the world around us. Or if the bulk of the cittas were inactive, then our minds would be blank for weeks on end as our minds churned through inactive cittas one at a time. However we look at this, there would be no way for a Buddhist Theory of Karma, operating on an appropriately human scale, to logically connect intentions, actions and consequences and the rationale for our morality would be lost.

Another problem is that now a citta is conditioned by two previous cittas on most occasions: one in order to allow karma to work, and one to ensure strict sequence is obeyed. This contradicts the axiom that only one citta can be active at a time. In the diagram above, at time moment 11, citta a4 arises on the condition of citta d1 (which is immediately previous in temporal sequence) and citta a3 (which is the most recent in the karma sequence), but the latter is now operating from three moments of time from the past. As time goes on the cittas associated with a particular karma must bridge more and more time: minutes, hours, days, weeks, perhaps years, perhaps life times. We've seen that the Sarvāstivādin solution was to allow this, but that Nāgārjuna pointed it out that it is tantamount to eternalism to allow a citta to exist beyond the moment when its conditions have ceased. There's no way to make past cittas be conditions for present cittas beyond the immediately preceding moment. And if we allow two cittas, then why not three, or arbitrary many? What is to stop karmas producing infinitely many results? Why would the experience of vipāka bring an end to the consequences of any given karma?

A way around this is a form of cummulative conditionality. The Theravāda Abhidhamma proposes that a citta is able to condition the next citta in 24 ways. Note that two pairs of the 24 conditions are identical, but have different names, which is a sure sign of the model being unsystematic and ad hoc. If we allow this, then it's not necessary to preserve the identity of the streams. The main objective of this scheme is to have a weighted average of karma active at the time of death, which acts as the main condition for one's next rebirth. This eliminates the problem of breaking axiom 1 (one citta at a time). On face value it explains how the information about our actions is carried forward and our rebirth is appropriate to our most recent lifetime of actions.

However this is a lossy process, because as soon as the moment is past, the link between consequence and action is lost: cummulation destroys information about individual karmas, just as a water drop loses its identity if it falls into the ocean. Although in some texts we are taught not to expect one-to-one correspondences between actions and consequences, in others there is a precise relation between them, and such correspondence is necessary especially for karma which ripens in this life. As above, we have to be able to logically connect actions and consequences in order to be moral. It must be completely obvious to anyone who looks, that being good leads to benefit and being evil leads to harm. For this to happen we must be able to identify the consequences of actions in this life. Else morality is simply an article of faith. This is the much misunderstood lesson of the Kālāma Sutta for example.

This version of karma certainly explains how karma can accumulate and affect rebirth, but it destroys the direct link between action and consequence. Only sums-over-time and averages count. Being good on average results in a good rebirth, and being bad on average results in a bad rebirth. This loss of connection also eliminates the possibility of karma ripening in this lifetime, unless it is as the immediately subsequent citta (instant karma). In terms of the metaphysics of karma, this is a workable solution. The loss of karma ripening in this lifetime is probably a good trade off for preserving karma more generally (especially at death/rebirth). However in terms of morality it opens the door to calculations and trade offs: I can kill this kitten and, as long as I make appropriate offerings to the monks, I can still come out ahead. Since traditionally Buddhists mostly aim at a better rebirth, they can now consciously do evil and as long as it is balanced out, not expect any painful consequences. Generally speaking Buddhist moralists like to emphasise that we are responsible for all of our actions, that all our actions count, and that all our actions ought to be good. So while workable, in fact this solution is a moral disaster. What's more it undercuts the idealism which fuels the intense practice necessary for liberation.

So when we scale karma models up they fail spectacularly, at multiple points, and across the board. None of the simple models that Buddhists offer as explanations for karma are able to achieve their stated goal. All subsequent attempts to rescue the Theory of Karma have failed. On its own terms karma does not work.


Conclusion

The axioms that Buddhists use to define and delimit the theory of karma mostly derive from of an ideological program rather than resulting from careful study of nature. These axioms force Buddhists into incoherent or self-contradictory positions on karma that can only be addressed by ad hoc extensions and black-box processes. Those that were traditionally added, brought new metaphysical problems and beyond a certain point these are not addressed by the Buddhist tradition.

Simplistic models of karma break down when we add real-world complexity. What holds for one karma does not hold for two, let alone for a realistic number. This is not just poor abstract philosophy. People base their actions and their life choices on these ideas. If the argument presented here is correct, then karma is a poor basis for decision making because it doesn't make sense and doesn't explain how morality works. Furthermore karma is at the heart of Buddhism. As I have shown in previous essays, where there was a conflict between karma and the highly esteemed idea of dependent-arising (pratītyasamutpāda) it was always the latter that was altered to preserve the functionality of karma. Karma is primary. Without karma Buddhism unravels.

From the beginning there were at least two karma stories. One in which everyone is responsible for their actions and through observation of action and consequence can learn to be a better person. The promised reward of good behaviour was esteem and happiness, both in this life and the next. This message was delivered through folk tales, especially in the form of stories of the past lives of the Buddha and his companions and family: the Jātakas. The second story sought to ethicise the afterlife, i.e. to make morality hold over multiple lifetimes, without breaking the axiom of impermanence. This story gave rise to increasingly sophisticated metaphysical speculation. The two were never successfully reconciled, and the metaphysics became a mess of ad hoc extensions and black-box processes that in practice end up obscuring the link between action and consequence.

Initially the problems stimulated debate and doctrinal innovations amongst different Buddhist sects (as we find ample evidence for in our literature). The records of the debates leave us with the impression of a rich diversity of opinion and a lively critical atmosphere. They also supply us with pre-formulated critiques of all the existing models of karma. However, it seems that the impetus for new and better explanations ran out before the problem was solved.

The old question was always, "Karma must work, but how does it work?" Now we find ourselves asking, "How can karma possibly work, and what happens if it doesn't work?" 

~~oOo~~

† This simplifying assumption of a single karma giving rise to a single stream of cittas and a single result is very similar to the simplifying assumption made by macro-economists trying to apply the micro-economic theory of supply and demand to a whole economy. They literally assume that the whole economy can be modelled by assuming a single product and a single consumer paying a single price. Clearly this is nothing like reality and as Prof Steve Keen has shown in his book Debunking Economics, this assumption has been repeatedly shown to be untenable. 

Bibliography

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.

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’...”

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: 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.")

1. the afterlife cannot be factually disproved; and that 
2. anecdotes about experiences are convincing. 

• The fact of universal death creates cognitive dissonance. 
• According to testimony, certain experiences appear to demonstrate that consciousness is not tied to the body, but can exist independently.
• So the idea that something might survive the death of the body and continue to "live" seems plausible.
• Emotional weighting of facts (salience) makes this seem probable, and the finality of death improbable.
• Since the finality of death causes intense cognitive dissonance, post-mortem survival seems preferable.
• We make the leap from probable/preferable to actually true; and it feels satisfying because we have resolved the dissonance created by the fact of death and been consistent with our other beliefs.

(Adapted from my 2012 essay on the plausibility and salience of rebirth.)

your move...

This is a text I recently stumbled upon. It is quite interesting because it directly addresses the issue of freewill, something I have not come across in a Buddhist text before. The Buddha is seen arguing with Brahmin who denies freewill and argues for a form of determinism or fatalism. This kind of view is popular again today. Advaita Vedanta enthusiasts, such as Gary Weber, also hold that free will is an illusion and that everything is predetermined. We are increasingly seeing the influence of Advaita Vedanta on Buddhists who use the self-enquiry methods of Vedantins. Many scientists are also determinists are well. Therefore knowing how the suttakāro dealt with this assertion is of some interest.

Atha kho aññataro brāhmaṇo yena bhagavā tenupasaṅkami; upasaṅkamitvā bhagavatā saddhiṃ sammodi. Sammodanīyaṃ kathaṃ sāraṇīyaṃ vītisāretvā ekamantaṃ nisīdi. Ekamantaṃ nisinno kho so brāhmaṇo bhagavantaṃ etad avoca – ‘‘ahañhi, bho gotama, evaṃvādī evaṃdiṭṭhi – ‘natthi attakāro, natthi parakāro’’’ti. 

Just then a certain Brahmin approached the Bhagavan and exchanged polite greetings. Having greeted each other the Brahmin sat down on one side and spoke to the Buddha. "Mr Gotama, my philosophy, my view, is that there is no 'one's own action'; there is no 'another's action'.

Māhaṃ, brāhmaṇa, evaṃvādiṃ evaṃdiṭṭhiṃ addasaṃ vā assosiṃ vā. Kathañhi nāma sayaṃ abhikkamanto, sayaṃ paṭikkamanto evaṃ vakkhati – ‘natthi attakāro, natthi parakāro' ti!

Brahmin I've never seen or heard of this philosophy, this view. For how indeed does one who comes and goes under his own steam possibly say: there is no 'one's own action'; there is no 'another's action'.

Taṃ kiṃ maññasi, brāhmaṇa, atthi ārabbhadhātū ti?
Evaṃ, bho.
Ārabbhadhātuyā sati ārabbhavanto sattā paññāyantī ti?
Evaṃ, bho.
Yaṃ kho, brāhmaṇa, ārabbhadhātuyā sati ārabbhavanto sattā paññāyanti, ayaṃ sattānaṃ attakāro ayaṃ parakāro.

In the latter half of the 20th century a series of pioneering experiments by Benjamin Libet, a neuroscientist at the University of California in San Francisco, demonstrated a rather startling phenomenon. Libet was able to show that a conscious decision to flex one's wrist was preceded by brain activity which prepared to make the movement. It appeared that we decide unconsciously to make the move, the brain prepares to send the signal to move, and only then do we become conscious of having made a decision. This experiment and others like it have been interpreted by many as showing that freewill is "an illusion". In this essay I explore this argument and outline an important counter-argument by Patricia S. Churchland, Professor Emerita of Philosophy at UC, San Diego. I also look briefly at the determinist argument that some physicists profess. Freewill is not a particularly interesting problem, but since a lot of people talk about it, this is my two cents worth.

"... your decisions are not caused by anything at all—not by your goals, emotions, motives, knowledge, or whatever. Somehow, according to this idea, your will (whatever that is) creates a decision by reason (whatever that is)." (2013: 179; emphasis in the original)

"...if contracausal choice is the intended meaning, the claim that free will in that sense is an illusion is only marginally interesting, Because nothing in the law, in child-rearing, or in everyday life depends in any significant way on the idea that free choice requires freedom from all causes." (184)

"so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion." (32)

Sean Carroll has also expressed the view that we're all machines that think. This argument is related to the one I was exploring with regard to the afterlife. Life is made up of atoms and we understand the behaviour of atoms, so we understand the basis upon which life exists, even if we don't quite understand all the processes of life yet. But whereas the claim about the afterlife was strictly limited to the persistence of information about the person after death as governed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics (Entropy always increases in a closed system), this claim about a deterministic universe is unlimited. The unlimited nature of the claim trips it up.

It is true that we understand the behaviour of atoms at the energy, mass and length scales relevant to living things. But we also have to take into account the nature of complex systems. Even when a complex system is made up of simple elements following simple rules, the behaviour of the system is nondeterministic: we cannot predict it. When a system is made up of complex elements which combine according to complex rules and we get emergent properties at several different levels at once, then that system is decidedly not deterministic. An economy or the weather are not deterministic, not predictable.

As far as life is concerned we don't have perfect knowledge of the starting conditions and nor can we ever gain such knowledge. As far as the universe as a whole this also appears to be true. We can conjecture, but not have perfect knowledge. In fact because of random quantum fluctuations in space-time we can never be entirely sure about the elements in play. And the rules are sufficiently complex that to date no one understands them with anything like perfect knowledge (something acknowledged by Hawking, who goes so far as to say that he doubts we'll ever have a unified set of equations for the universe). The mathematics describing a single sub-atomic particle interacting with all the known fields has yet to be solved: it involves 7 or 9 extra dimensions of space that themselves at so small that they add nothing to the dimensionality we experience.

We can demonstrate the problem by considering a simple pendulum and then adding complexity. A simple pendulum vibrates in two dimensions, with one end fixed. The behaviour of this pendulum follows a simple law: the period of the vibration for small amplitude (θ << 1) is approximated by:

Where L is the length of the pendulum and g is the acceleration due to gravity. In fact for longer amplitudes the equation is more precisely:

This is complicated, but in fact not difficult to solve to an arbitrary level of accuracy (the factors in the series quickly become vanishingly small). For most large clocks only one or two members of the series are required for sufficient accuracy in calculations.

Intuitively we might think that adding a joint to the pendulum halfway along it's length, in effect a pendulum attached to the end of another pendulum, would complicate matters, but not so much. But in fact a double pendulum's motion is chaotic. Technically if we precisely specify the starting conditions we can predict it's motion, but we can only calculate the next moment, by precisely knowing what has happened from time = 0. For each moment in time the calculation gets longer until it very quickly becomes too difficult a problem for all the computing power inherent in the universe. If we start at an arbitrary time we have almost no chance of calculating what will happen next. A double pendulum is still technically deterministic, because it is theoretically possible to know the starting conditions, the precise details of the system, and the rules that must be followed.

If we conceive of an atom as being connected to other atoms by forces, then a system with two atoms would be like a double pendulum with no fixed end and instead of vibrating in only two dimensions they vibrate in three. The motions of these two atoms are chaotic and far more difficult to predict than a simple double pendulum, i.e. far more difficult than virtually impossible.

Now consider than there are of the order of 10¹⁰⁰atoms in the universe and all of them are connected via forces to each other. And we need to keep in mind that atoms, themselves are in fact systems of smaller particles which are again all interacting with all the other particles, and that fundamentally all that we see as particles and forces are simply vibrations of interacting fields that extend throughout the universe. Conceived of as a pendulum the overall motion of the universe is essentially infinitely complex. Even if we could precisely define the first moment in the history of the universe (something we cannot yet do), then by the second moment the vibrations in the various fields would be impossible to calculate. By the time particles appeared on the scene as an emergent property of the cooling universe, the system is already impossible to predict on the lowest scales. A system like this cannot be considered deterministic, even in theory.


What Kind of Ordered Universe Do We See?

So an obvious question then is, why do we see ordered behaviour at all? The order we see emerging from this 3D pendulum with 10¹⁰⁰ moving parts is because of emergent properties when looking at different scales. Order, or quasi-order, appears in chaotic systems. Think of a hurricane. From space it looks like a relatively regular spiral, or a circle, even though at ground-level it can be chaotic. Also the intensity of the forces involved follow inverse square laws, or inverse fourth-power laws. In theory all fields extend throughout the universe, but the effects of forces are typically short range. Gravity is the only force with a very long range and that is mainly because the masses involved in cosmological phenomena are unimaginably large.

The characteristic ordering (or quasi-ordering) we see depends on the scale we adopt. For example 1g of pure carbon contains about 6 x 10²³ atoms. In a previous essay I pointed out that if each atom was one millilitre in volume, that gram of carbon would fill the western Mediterranean Sea. The atoms are in motion, but the motions are many orders of magnitude smaller than a human eye can see. When we look at this many atoms, the tiny motions of each atom are cancelled out by other atoms doing the opposite. Each atom is regular in a number of ways: each carbon atom has six protons and six electrons, and either 6, 7, or 8 neutrons (giving ¹²C, ¹³C, and ¹⁴C), the chemistry of carbon is very predictable and the shape of its molecules known very precisely. But a diamond, a single gigantic molecule of carbon atoms, does not behave like an individual atom. Crystals are macro-structures that exhibit different kinds of regularities than atoms do. Sit two diamonds together and they do not interact, do not behave as a system at all. Carbon macro-molecules have very different properties to individual carbon atoms. A carbon atom is highly reactive and can form millions of compounds. Diamond by contrast is one of the most inert naturally occurring substances.

Steven Hawking wants us to believe that people are just complex machines. But this is not credible either. Perhaps at some absolute level of abstraction this is true, but not in any meaningful sense. The most complex machines we can make are still less complex than a single cell in our body. We are made from atoms, but millions of billions of billions of atoms, following complex rules; built up from another system of simpler components, also following complex rules, itself the visible manifestation of fields. We could not specify all the atoms of a person and predict what was going to happen next without first calculating every vibration in every field in the entire universe from the first moment in time. With all due respect, Hawking might be a good physicist, but he appears to be a poor philosopher. This may be why he also wrongly claims that philosophy is dead. There is nothing deterministic about a human being, which is why philosophy is very much alive (if not entirely well).

Nothing we know about the emergent properties of collections of Septillions of atoms rules out freewill as an emergent property. Nor are consciousness, or for that matter life itself, ruled out as properties of these unimaginably complex systems. We are very far from having plumbed the depths of the complexity of the universe, despite the fact that the elements and the rules governing the system are quite clear. An analogy here is the chess board. There are 32 pieces on 64 squares and the game has clearly defined rules. We can calculate the theoretical number of different games, and the best computers are better than the best humans, and yet not once has a recorded game ever been the same as a previously recorded game. The difference is that our game has 10¹⁰⁰ pieces!

Churchland, Patricia S. (2013) Touching A Nerve: The Self as Brain. W. W. Norton & Co. 

Midgley, Mary. (1979) 'Gene-juggling'. Philosophy. 54(210): 439-458.

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).

• Pāli antarāparinibbāyin
• Gāndhāri aṃtarapariṇivaï
• Chinese 中般涅槃

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

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

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)

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

National Geographic

In his book The Selfless Mind, Peter Harvey (1995: §6.5-6.12) makes a persuasive case for an early Buddhist 'life principle' (jīva) in the Pāli texts which is not permanent, but provides the necessary continuity between lives to allow karma to operate. As I read the later Buddhist traditions this jīva was universally repudiated and dropped from eschatological discourses, which has made me reluctant to admit the role implied for jīva in the early texts. This essay will explore this case, offer some criticism based on the texts, and re-examine it from a contemporary point of view. Ultimately I don't find Harvey's case compelling.

Jīva is from the verbal root √jīv'live' which is cognate with Greek bio, Latin vivere (whence vital), and Old English cwic 'alive' (hence "the quick and the dead"). Jīva is a verbal noun, literally meaning 'living, alive' and it's used across many Indian traditions to mean 'that which causes a being to be alive', i.e. as spirit in the Vitalist sense. Most obviously it is the difference between a living being and a dead one, and this is important in the passages cited in The Selfless Mind.

This suggests that one who is proficient at meditation is aware of a kind of life principle in the form of [viññāṇa]* (perhaps with some accompaniments), this being dependent on the mortal physical body.

* Harvey idiosyncratically, and I would say confusingly, translates viññāṇa as "discernment" throughout his book. Emphasis is in the original 

natthi paro loko, natthi sattā opapātikā, natthi sukaṭakkaṭānaṃ kammānaṃ phalaṃ vipāko 

There is no other world, no reborn beings, and no fruit or result from actions well done or badly done. 

It can thus be seen that the 'life principle' or 'spirit' accepted by the 'early suttas' is 'vitality, heat and [viññāna]', or perhaps [viññāna] and the subtle 'mind-made body'. It consists of conditionally arisen changing processes, which are not identical with the mortal body, nor totally different from it, but partly dependent on it.' (95) 

Evameva kho tvaṃ, rājañña, bālo abyatto ayoniso paralokaṃ gavesissasi.

Just so, you, Prince, are foolishly, senselessly and unwisely seeking the other world.

Most modern discussions of the afterlife in the Vedas say that rebirth/reincarnation is not found in the Ṛgveda. Conventionally speaking, the first mention of rebirth in India literature is thought to be in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad (4.4). This text was composed somewhat before Buddhism and probably in or near the kingdom of Kosala (within reach of the śrāmaṇa religions). The idea of karma in relation to rebirth is introduced by a king (kṣatriya) and many scholars take this to mean that the Brahmins adopted rebirth from a śrāmaṇa group.

Joanna Jurewicz has shown that despite the conventional understanding that there is evidence for belief in rebirth in the Ṛgveda. This essay will walk through her discovery and comment on the relevance for Buddhist rebirth. Jurewicz's discovery begins with by revisiting a well known passage in the Ṛgveda. In RV 10.16.5 we find this passage. I cite Wendy Doniger's translation to show the conventional understanding of this stanza.

áva sr̥ja púnar agne pitŕ̥bhyo yás ta ā́hutaś cárati svadhā́bhiḥ |
ā́yur vásāna úpa vetu śéṣaḥ sáṃ gachatāṃ tanúvā jātavedaḥ ||

Set him free again to go to the fathers, Agni, when he has been offered as an oblation in you and wanders with the sacrificial drink. Let him reach his own descendent, dressing himself in a life-span. O knower of creatures, let him join with a body. 

"Release him to his fathers and again down from them, who, poured into you, travels

according to his will. Let him who wears life come to his offspring. Let him join his

body, Jatavedas!"

Where does blue begin and end?

There's a meme that seems to come around again and again on the internet. It is that if a language has no word for a concept then that concept must be absent in that language. This naive reading has been applied to the colour blue for example. Some people noticed that ancient European writers, particularly the ancient Greeks, had a limited colour palette in their writing. Indeed many modern languages are rather lacking in colour terms. Until the 1540s there was no word for the colour orange in English, which is why we call people with ginger hair "red heads". This does not mean that we could not distinguish the colour of blood from the colour of ginger hair. It only means that they were in the same colour category. And when we did name the colour orange, we named it after the fruit, not the other way around. However, it seems journalists love this idea that the Ancient Greeks could not see blue and the idea lumbers around like a zombie eating brains: it gets knocked down, but is quite difficult to kill and reduces IQs. 

When we think of 'dog' as a category we will have an internalised prototype that defines the category. And we judge other entities to be a member of our category to the extent that they resemble our prototype (this is an extension of Wittgenstein's family resemblances'). By definition some members may be more central and others more peripheral. Say our prototype is something like a German shepherd (left). we can acknowledge, as dogs themselves usually do, that both a chihuahua and a great dane are members of the category dog, despite their size. Similarly though a long muzzle is typical, we can acknowledge that dogs with mutated skulls that give them a squashed look (boxers, pugs) are still dogs. On the other hand despite being furry, carnivorous, quadrupeds, no kind of cat is is a member of the category dog. In Cambridge there is a couple who take their cat out on a lead. But even a cat on a lead is not a dog.

However, the prototype is not fixed or absolute. It is relative to many things, not least of which is how we interact with the category. With respect to dogs, a farmer or a hunter may think in terms of a working animal, a pet owner in terms of companionship, and so on. On the other hand in India dogs are often semi-domesticated urban scavengers - neither pets nor workers, but barely tolerable vermin. In some cultures dogs are seen as food. 

"Empedocles, one of the earliest Ancient Greek color theorists, described color as falling into four areas, light or white, black or dark, red and yellow; Xenophanes described the rainbow as having three bands of color: purple, green/yellow, and red." (Ancient Greek Color Vision)

"black, white, red, yellow, green, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange and gray."

Japanese Yama (Enma) as a Confucian administrator.

Yama is a fascinating figure. He rules over the afterlife, but is not one of the devas. Vedic myth names him as the first man to find his way to the realm of the ancestors (pitṛloka). He is thus a culture hero who opens the possibility of rebirth for Brahmin ritualists. The realm of ancestors starts off on the same level of the devas, and is progressively demoted until it becomes a place of torment and punishment. In parallel, the departed (preta) are transformed from the fortunate ones going to their ancestors, to a tortured group of ghosts stuck in limbo.

As we saw in an earlier essay, Yama has a twin sister Yamī. In fact the most likely meaning of the name Yama is 'twin'. Yama has a counterpart in Iranian myth called Yima and, in Avestan myth, the incest of the twins helps to found the human race. In the Ṛgveda the brother resists incest with his sister. I've written about the curious fact that the Pali suttas record that the Śākyas claim descent from a sibling incest mating, which I take to be evidence of their connection to Iran (see Possible Iranian Origins for the Śākyas and Aspects of Buddhism). Brother-sister incest was common amongst ancient Iranian royalty, a practice I believe them to have adopted on the Egyptian model. Some scholars have tried to link Yama to the Norse Ymir, but this is disputed.

Yama in RV 10.14 has two messengers which are brindle-coloured, four-eyed dogs (sārameyaú śuvā́nau caturakṣaú śabálau) with flared nostrils (urūṇasā́v). They wander among men, satisfying themselves on the breath of life (asu). However they are also keepers of the path (pathirákṣī)  and watch over men (nṛcákṣasau). Note that some authorities think that śabala (brindle) is cognate with Greek ḱerberos (spotted), the name of the Hades's 3-headed watchdog. Hades named his dog "Spot". The Buddhist Yama also two messengers though their form as dogs seems not to be mentioned.

Yama as we know him in early Buddhist texts is the ruler (rājan) of the rebirth destinations known as Niraya (Pali) or Naraka (Pāḷi & Sanskrit). PED derives niraya from nis+√i'to go down' (nis- followed by a vowel become nir-). PED also cites a parallel in Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit, though this is not listed in Edgerton's BHSD. However relating this to Classical and Vedic naraka is not straight forward. The vowels a and i are not interchangeable and the prefix nis or nir cannot simply become nar. It might work if there was an ancestral term such as nṛ or nara a real word meaning 'man, hero, person'. In secondary formations the vowel ṛ is strengthened to ra or ar. The word nṛ derives from an Indo-European root *ner and via Greek (a-nēr > andr) is the source of words such as androgynous, polyandrous, and philander. It comes into Sanskrit again as √nṛt'to dance' (from the connotation of vigour). A naraka would then be something belonging to men or people, or heroic. And we can imagine Prakrit representing this as niraka. The substitution of -ya for -ka is conceivable as both can be adjectival. But this doesn't explain the nature of niraya/naraka. PED lists the etymology of naraka as "doubtful". I'll come back to this question after surveying the literature on Yama and Hell.


Yama in the Ṛgveda.

As a place of extreme suffering, the levels of Naraka are often referred to as "hell realms". One of the key early sources for the story of Yama as king of the afterlife is Ṛgveda 10.14.2:

yamó no gātúm prathamó viveda 
naíṣā́ gávyūtir ápabhartavā́ u |
yátrā naḥ pū́rve pitáraḥ pareyúr
enā́ jajñānā́ḥ pathíyā ánu svā́ḥ || 10.14.2 ||

Yama was first to discover this pasture that cannot be taken away.
Where our ancestor crossed over, all the born follow, by their own path.

O Indra and Soma, the evil doers were hurled into a pit which is beginningless darkness.
Not one returns from there, may your rage overpower them. [My translation]

• Stausberg "... throw them forth the evil doers into the enclosure, into the anchorless darkness."
• Doniger"... pierce the evil-doers and hurl them into the pit, the bottomless darkness."
• Griffiths" plunge the wicked in the depth, yea, cast them into darkness that hath no support,"

índrāsomā duṣkŕ̥to vavré antár anārambhaṇé támasi prá vidhyatam |

ávaviddhaṃ taugriyám apsú antár anārambhaṇé támasi práviddham |
cátasro nā́vo jáṭhalasya júṣṭā úd aśvíbhyām iṣitā́ḥ pārayanti || 

Four ships most welcome in the midst of ocean,
Urged by the Asvins, save the son of Tugra,
Him who was cast down headlong in the waters,
Plunged in the thick inevitable darkness. [Griffiths]

Initially the pitṛloka and the devaloka were more or less on the same level even when they were distinguished. It seems that the devaloka was not initially thought of as an afterlife destination. Humans were not reborn as gods. This may be a Buddhist innovation. Cuevas notes that the pitṛloka came to be demoted in height and status, becoming associated with the antarīkṣa (for the significance of vertical spatial metaphors see Metaphors and Materialism). By the time of the early Upaniṣads the pitṛloka is associated with "the moon, darkness, sacrificial activity and rebirth" whereas the devaloka is associated with "the sun, light, knowledge and immortality" (Cuevas 272). This is particularly seen in the passages regarding the five fire knowledge (pañcāgnividyā) that describe a number of after-life paths and destinations. By contrast going to the devas becomes the first step on a journey out of saṃsāra that culminates in going to Brahman.

click to embiggen

Consider the Devadūta Sutta (MN 130, M iii.178) which explains how after death a being who has behaved badly might be reborn in hell (niraya); there they will be seized by the guardians of hell (nirayapālā), dragged before King Yama and cross-examined about their evil conduct of body, speech and mind. Unable to account for themselves, they are then condemned to horrific tortures which are graphically described. It is emphasised that "as long as that evil action is not destroyed, he does not die" (na ca tāva kālaṅkaroti yāva na taṃ pāpakammaṃ byantīhoti).

Ṛgveda texts taken from the metrically restored text by Karen Thomson and Jonathan Slocum. 

Anālayo (2011) A Comparative Study of the Majjhima-nikāya. Volume 2 (Studies of Discourses 91 to 152, Conclusion, Abbreviations, References, Appendix). Dharma Drum Publishing Corporation.

Bingenheimer, Marcus. Anālayo & Bucknell, Roderick S. (eds) (2013) The Madhyama Āgama (Middle Length Discourses) Vol. 1. (Taishō Vol. 2, no. 26). Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai America.

Cuevas, Bryan Jaré. (1996) 'Predecessors and Prototypes: Towards a Conceptual History of the Buddhist Antarabhava.' Numen 43(3): 263-302.

Doniger O'Flaherty, Wendy. (1981) The Rig Veda: An Anthology. Penguin

Jurewicz, Joanna. (2008) 'Rebirth eschatology in the Rgveda. In search for roots of transmigration.' Indologica Taurinensia: The Journal of the International Association of Sanskrit Studies. 34: 183-

Skjaervo, Prods Oktor. (2012) 'Jamšid i. Myth of Jamšid.'Encyclopaedia Iranica. Vol. XIV, Fasc. 5, pp. 501-522. http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/jamsid-i

Stausberg, Michael (2000). “Hell in Zoroastrian History.” Numen 56: 217-253. http://michaelstausberg.net/old_site/Texts/Stausberg%20Hell%20Numen%2056.pdf

Sharon Stone being "blessed" by a priest.

In a forthcoming article posted in draft form on academic.edu, 'The Forest Hypothesis', David Drewes considers the question of the origins of Mahāyāna, in the process critiquing recent scholarship by some of the biggest names in this area: Greg Schopen, Paul Harrison, Reggie Ray and Jan Nattier.

This is an important article because it exposes the rather flimsy foundations on which some of the authors have rested some of their conclusions. It's good to see a scholar willing to write and publish critical scholarship at a time when academic journals seem to be reluctant to publish this kind of critique. Perhaps it's because all of the players are long established professors that this is possible. Their reputations are solid enough to withstand a little constructive criticism. In a target culture a critical article would have a disproportionate impact on a scholar's career prospects - and this is bad news for scholarship generally.

This essay will highlight and discuss some particular comments made within the article that are to some extent peripheral to its main point. These thoughts emerge from reflecting on Drewes critique of the way that Buddhists and Buddhologists do history. In particular this paragraph stood out:

"The idea that Buddhism focused on meditation and the transformation of experience was first presented by D.T. Suzuki in the nineteen-twenties in an attempt to claim legitimacy for Japanese Zen Buddhism. Though Suzuki conceded to Pāli scholars that early texts provide little evidence for this, others soon read his perspective back into Pāli texts and it quickly became established as the primary apologetic strategy for depicting Buddhism in general as having special relevance to the modern world." (16-17; my emphasis).

"The Buddhahood Mahāyānists sought was not the thin, this-worldly, religious experience of modern apologists, but a state of omniscience and nearly infinite power and glory to be attained in another world after death. Though they remain largely unexplored, the primary methods that Mahāyāna sūtras recommend for pursuing this goal are magical or supernatural means of generating merit (puṇya) that would be very difficult to construe as having any special value in secular discourse. Until we put aside the attempt to depict ancient Buddhists as being focused on something that has special relevance to modern life, an understanding of their religious world will remain beyond our reach." [Emphasis added]

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

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.

Vasubandhu 世親 (via IEP)

Emerging from early attempts at systematisation of Buddhism, sectarian Buddhists, especially those who developed Abhidharma, continued to think carefully about the theories they had inherited they discovered more and more problems. In my recent essays I've discussed a number of problems that these Buddhists inherited and some of the different approaches to the problems.

The picture that we have of Buddhist history was heavily skewed by the destruction of Buddhism in India with the lost of the larger proportion of Buddhist texts. For example we presume there was a Canon of early writings in Sanskrit and one in Gāndhārī and we have lost the bulk of both of them. This sometimes means that we know only a little about the various sects and what we think we know is often from polemics written by their opponents (who were far from scrupulous in representing each other). One result is that we can mistakenly see historical Buddhism as more homogeneous than it in fact was. It's common for modern writers on Buddhism to minimise the heterogeneity of early Buddhism and emphasise the commonality rather than the disputes. I'm interested in exploring just how disparate Buddhist sects were from each other. In some cases the disagreements were extreme. 

Anacker, Stefan (1972) 'Vasubandhu's Karmasiddhiprakaraṇa and the problem of the highest meditations.'Philosophy East & West. 22(3): 247-258.

Jaini, Padmanabh. (1959) 'The Sautrāntika Theory of Bīja.' BSOAS 22(2): 236-249.

Xīnjīng

One of the important conclusions of Jan Nattier's 1992 article on the Heart Sutra was that the traditional dates ascribed to its composition could not be correct and that it is more likely that it was composed in the 7th century, a time period which coincides with the life of Xuánzàng (602 – 664 CE) and his activity as pilgrim and translator. This coincidence allows Nattier to speculate that it might even have been Xuánzàng who translated the text from Chinese into Sanskrit. The speculation is bolstered by the fact that Xuánzàng has form in this area. He is known to have translated the Chinese authored 《大乘起信論》 (Dàshéng qǐxìn lùn) or Awakening of Faith in Mahāyāna into Sanskrit.

In this essay I will rehearse Nattier's arguments about chronology and attribution of the Chinese translations as a prelude to discussing the challenge to them published by Dan Lusthaus. Lusthaus (2003) draws attention to two Chinese commentaries on the Heart Sutra, one of which appears to refer to alternate versions of the Heart Sutra in a way that Lusthaus claims poses "serious problems" for Nattiers conclusions about the chronology of the Heart Sutra. As one of the few scholars to engage critically with Nattier's thesis in print, Lusthaus's article is interesting both for the new information it presents and for the test it provides for the Chinese Origin thesis.

Another reason to rehearse this aspect of Nattier's thesis, is that that the popular Zen inspired commentaries seem to struggle with it. Red Pine, Mu Seong, and Kazuaki Tanahashi all seem to be in denial about the evidence. As such, most modern readers are given the impression that Nattier's argument is weak or improbable. But this is not the case.

In this essay I favour the Pinyin Romanisation of Chinese characters. Lusthaus and Nattier both use the Wade-Giles system. Additionally, Lusthaus uses McCune–Reischauerfor the name of the Korean monk 원측, and the Revised Romanisation of Korean proposed by the South Korean government is now standard. I silently emend their Romanisation to fit my own preference (and recent scholarly convention). In particular I change the names:

• 玄奘: Hsüan-tsang > Xuánzàng 
• 원측: Wŏnch’ŭk > Woncheuk
• 窺基: K'uei-chi > Kuījī 

《摩訶般若波羅蜜神咒一巻》
Móhēbōrěbōluómì shénzhòu yī juàn
Great Perfection of Wisdom Vidyā in one scroll

Avalokiteśvara  Huntington Archive

Avalokiteśvara (aka Guānyīn, Kannon, Chenrezik) is probably the best known Buddhist deity after the Buddha. Avalokiteśvara makes his first appearance in Buddhist literature as one of two bodhisattvas flanking Amitāyus in the Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtras and continues to play roles associated with the qualities of Amitābha, particularly karuṇā or compassion. He is one of the first mythic figures who has no discernible basis in an historical person, but emerges as a Buddhist value (karuṇā) personified. He (or indeed She in China) was and continues to be one of the most important figures in the Buddhist pantheon, both in Asia and in the West.

This essay will be particular concerned with the name Avalokiteśvara. We most commonly read that this name means something like 'Lord Who Looks Down'. This is how Conze reads the name in his Heart Sutra commentary and it's also a feature of the commentarial literature on the Heart Sutra . We'll see that the name changed, perhaps in the 6th or 7th century, and that the etymology alone is insufficient to fully understand what the name means and how to translate it. 

This is confirmed for example by the Indian commentaries preserved in Tibetan, viz. “Because he looks down on all sentient beings at all times and in all ways with great love and compassion, he is the one who looks down (avalokita)” (Lopez 1988: 43); “Because he is superior and is the lord who looks down, he is called the ‘Noble Lord Who Looks Down (āryāvalokiteśvara)” (Vimalamitra in Lopez 1996: 52). Looking down on the world and its inhabitants is one of the prominent characteristics of this figure in Buddhist mythology. 

"In the Avalokita Sūtras, avalokita does not refer to a being, but means that which has been seen by those who have crossed over saṃsāra, and is therefore a synonym for enlightenment." (237)

Guang Xing (2011). 'Avalokiteśvara in China.' The Indian International Journal of Buddhist Studies 12, 2011 

Jones. J. J. (1952) Mahavastu. (Trans.) Vol. II. Luzac & co.

Nattier, Jan (1992). ‘The Heart Sūtra: a Chinese apocryphal text?’ Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies. 15 (2) 153-223. Online: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/ojs/index.php/jiabs/article/view/8800/2707

Roberts, Peter Alan. (2012) ‘Translating Translation: An Encounter with the Ninth-Century Tibetan Version of the Kāraṇḍavyūha-sūtra.’ Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies. 2: 224-242.

Senart, Émile (1882-1897) Mahavastu-Avadana. 3 vols. Paris.

Studholme, Alexander. (2002) The Origins of Oṃ Maṇipadme Hūṃ: A Study of the Kāraṇḍavyūha Sūtra. State University of New York.