Jayarava's Raves

My Pāḷi reading group has been working through the commentary to the Kāraṇiya Metta Sutta which I translated for this blog some years ago (11 Jun 2010). In this text we come across an unusual term that has no counterpart in the suttas. In picturing some bhikkhus zealously meditating in the forest it describes them as yāmagaṇḍikaṃ koṭṭetvā. This is a curious expression and in this essay I'll attempt to elucidate what it means. The compound yāmagaṇḍika occurs only twice, both times in commentarial texts (Paramatthajotikā SnA 1.193; Papañcasūdaniyā, MNA 1.122) and these should be enough to allow us to gain some clarity. We'll see that the commentator does not see his own time in context, but wrongly assumes that his milieu reflects that of the Buddha some centuries earlier.

The gerund koṭṭetvā must come from the verb koṭṭeti (from a rare root √kuṭ or kuṭṭ) 'to beat, crush, pound'. For example it is the action associated with a mortar (udukkhale koṭṭetvā DN ii.341) and with pounding grain (dhaññaṃ koṭṭenti Thī 117). It has other minor senses in PED, but these don't seem relevant here. The compound yāmagaṇḍika combines yāma and gaṇḍikā. We'll take these one at a time.

According to PED gaṇḍikā derives from gaṇḍa'a swelling; a stalk or shaft' + -ikā. The formation gaṇḍikā means 'a stalk or shaft', particularly 'the trunk of a tree' and by association 'a block of wood'. However there is a potential confusion here with ghaṇṭā'bell' or ghaṭikā 'gong'. As we will see the CST edition of the text is quite unreliable and this means we must allow for errors. DOP sv ghaṇṭī/ghaṇḍī, suggests a possible confusion with gaṇḍi and ghaṇṭā. If it does mean 'block' then it must refer to a resonant gong-like block that is 'pounded' (√koṭṭ) as a time signal.

Yāma is more complicated because it has homonyms that derive from different verbs. From √yam'hold, hold back' + -a we get yāma'restraint'; and from √yā 'go' + -ma we get yāma'motion, going, progress'. The latter is used figurative to mean 'a watch of the night'. We frequently read in Pāḷi of the three watches of the night (tiyāmā): paṭhamayāma, majjhimayāma, and pacchimayāma (first, middle, and last watches). The practice of dividing the night in particular in watches was common in the ancient world. The Latin name for these periods was vigilia, whence English 'vigil'. Incidentally yāma can also be a collective noun for people or things related to the God of the afterlife, Yama, in this case his name means 'twin', from √yam'combine'.

The compound, yāmagaṇḍika, can really only be a tatpuruṣa so it must mean something like 'the block of restraint', or 'the gong of the watches'. The context is that the monks are resolute night and day, devoted to wise attention, and sitting at the foot of trees meditating. It may be that 'beating the block of restraint' is a metaphor that we no longer understand, similar to the Buddha saying to Upaka the Ājīvaka in the Ariyapariyesana Sutta, āhañchaṃ amatadundubhiṃ'I beat the drum of the deathless' (MN i.171). It's not entirely obvious what this means since drums are primarily for entertainment in our society.

However, I believe that here we must read yāma as 'watch of the night' and the phrase means 'beating the block or pounding the gong that marks the watches'. For confirmation we can look at the second of the two occurrences of Yāmagaṇḍika at MNA 1.122:

Ajagaravihārepi kāḷadevatthero antovasse yāmagaṇḍikaṃ paharati, āciṇṇametaṃ therassa. Na ca yāmayantanāḷikaṃ payojeti, aññe bhikkhū payojenti. Atha nikkhante paṭhame yāme there muggaraṃ gahetvā ṭhitamatteyeva ekaṃ dve vāre paharanteyeva vā yāmayantaṃ patati,

We immediately strike a problem in that ajagara probably means 'python' or some other large snake and doesn't fit the context, and the spelling of the next word (with -tth-) is suspect. Consulting the Dictionary of Pāli Names we find an entry for a Thera named Kāḷadeva:

"...incumbent of Vajagaragiri-vihāra. He is mentioned as having known the exact passage of time without the help of an "hour-glass" (yāmayantanālika). MA.i.100f

This is in fact, a reference to the passage we are about to analyse. It's thus apparent that the CST (Burmese) edition is incorrect here and we must amend it to:

Vajagara[giri]vihārepi kāḷadevathero antovasse yāmagaṇḍikaṃ paharati, āciṇṇametaṃ therassa. Na ca yāmayantanāḷikaṃ payojeti, aññe bhikkhū payojenti. Atha nikkhante paṭhame yāme there muggaraṃ gahetvā ṭhitamatte yeva ekaṃ dve vāre paharante yeva ca* yāmayantaṃ patati.

The Elder Kāḷadeva of Vajagaragiri Monastery, performs this striking of the block of the watches till the end of the rains. And he does not use a measuring device as other monks did. At the end of the first watch the Elder takes up the hammer (muggara) and strikes twice for every measure of time, just as the watch-mechanism falls.

* The text has vā, but I think this must also be wrong, and have amended to ca.

My translation of this passage is a little rough, but the main points are clear. For our purposes two things are important. It is entirely clear that yāma must refer to 'a watch of the night' rather than 'restraint'. Secondly we read that Kāḷadeva did not yāmayantanāḷikaṃ payojeti, that he used a hammer (muggara) to strike the block, and then yāmayantaṃ patati. And this helps to fill out what the author of the Metta Sutta commentary was thinking.

One of the problems of living a regular life is keeping time. The early forest monks had no way of telling the time apart from the sun, moon and stars. Pāḷi distinguishes day (diva) from night (ratti) and we read of monks doing things in the morning-time (pubbaṇhasamaya) or evening-time (sāyaṇhasamaya). We know that the phases of the moon—full moon (puṇṇacanda) and new moon (navacanda)—were important for organising the lives of monks. The moon takes on a magical significance for some Buddhists as a result of this. The watches of the night, however, are far more difficult to determine. How did monks, living in a forest, know when the watches began and end. Presumably the first watch started at dusk and the last ended at dawn, but what marked the other boundaries? Presumably one versed in astronomy would be able to keep track of when certain stars were due to rise and set, but the three month retreat is during the rain season when the skies are perpetually cloudy.

The simple answer is that the first monks almost certainly did not keep accurate track of the time and that the watches were assessed subjectively. And we can point out that no references to time keeping apart from observing the sun and moon are referenced in the suttas. The texts we are dealing with here, however, are from 5th century Sri Lanka and from an environment of highly organised, large scale, urban monasteries.

If we now look at the phrase yāmayantanāḷikaṃ payojeti we can see that the DOPN glosses it is as "the help of an hour-glass". Now an hour-glass is anachronistic here, they did not exist in this time or place. But yanta does mean 'mechanism' and nāḷika'a tube or measure'. So we know that Kāḷideva did not, as other monks did, employ (pa√yuj) a measure/tube device for the watches (yāma-yanta-nāḷika). This suggests some kind of clock, but is the idea plausible? I had a dig around in some horological books and apparently it is plausible to think that in first millennium India there were water-clocks.

Water-clocks come in two forms: a vessel with a hole that allows water to leak out slowly, and the slight more sophisticated sinking bowl, in which a bowl with a hole in it gradually sinks into a container of water. The books suggest that the sinking-bowl water-clock was common in India by medieval times and so accurate that it probably delayed the introduction of mechanical clocks. Importantly the attendant of water-clock announced the end of the time period by striking a 'gong'. The Gujarati word for which was ghaḍiyār. There's an outside possibility that this word is related to gaṇḍikā or ghaṭika.

Persian Water Clock.

We do know that the Achaemenid Persians possessed just such water clocks, from the records of Alexander's conquests in India by Callisthenes of Olynthus. We know that similar water-clocks were employed to mark the passage of time in monasteries in North India by the 7th century. This information comes from the records of Yijing (義淨 aka I-Tsing; ) a Chinese monk who lived 635–713 CE, and spend 25 years travelling, taking the southern sea route to India. Yijing's account (see translation by Takakusu 1896: 142-6) is widely recycled in a variety of other sources, for example Misra (1998) simply quotes Takakusu at length, while Sharfe (2002) paraphrases and the Wikipedia article on water-clocks cites Sharfe. Yijing records the use of sinking bowl water clocks in several monasteries, with each using slightly different measures and signalling conventions. The bowls were made of copper and were very expensive, generally being the gift of a king to a monastery.

So it seems at least plausible that urban monks in fifth century Sri Lanka measured the hours of the day using a water-clock and marked the increments by striking some kind of gong (probably wooden given how expensive metal was). And what our commentators have done is imagine that this is also what monks did in the Buddha's time. Thus when they tell the story of the Metta Sutta they project this technology backwards. And we know that they have done in this other ways as well. For example they projected South Indian kinship patterns familiar, to them in Sri Lanka, onto the family tree of the Buddha and his family, even though these patterns were out of place in North India (See Attwood 2012). But it is extremely unlikely that forest monks in the fifth century BC uses anything so elaborate to measure time.

One little loose end is that having struck the gong with the hammer, yeva ca yāmayantaṃ patati. Now patati comes from √pat 'fall, fly' and it's not usually a transitive verb. Yanta being a neuter noun we can read this as 'and just as the watch-mechanism falls'. If the yāmayanta falls at the end of the time period, then this is consistent with a sinking bowl style water clock.

It is fascinating how a short phrase like this one can open a window into history. And while here we are not talking about the time of the Buddha, but of the period of the Sri Lankan commentators, it is still a glimpse of history. It reinforces the point that the commentaries reflect their own time rather than any earlier time. They are apt to project their own culture and technology backwards onto the past, making them unreliable guides to the past. Thus when we consult the Pāḷi commentaries for insights into the suttas we must be cautious in drawing historical conclusions. The commentators were no doubt sincere, but they had a vested interest in trying to establish that the past was reflected in the present because it was one way of establishing their legitimacy as bearers of the tradition. It shows how very tenuous lineage is as a guide to legitimacy or authenticity.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Attwood, Jayarava. (2012) 'Possible Iranian Origins for Sākyas and Aspects of Buddhism.' Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, 3.

Misra B.N. (1998) Nālandā: Vol. 1. Sources and Background. B.R. Publishing Corporation.

Sharfe, Harmut. (2002) Education in Ancient India. Brill 2002.

Takakusu, J. trans. (1896) I-Tsing, A Record of the Buddhist Religion : As Practised in India and the Malay Archipelago (A.D. 671-695), Clarendon Press 1896. Reprint. New Delhi, AES, 2005.

Alan Turing's contribution to mathematics, cryptography and computer science. was inestimable. Not only did he shorten World War Two, saving thousands of lives, he advanced us onto the path of digital computers. His suicide after being coerced into hormone treatment is a massive blot on the intellectual landscape in Britain. It is an enduring source of shame. Turing's work remained classified for decades because of the fear that war might break out again and knowing how to break the complex codes used by the Germans was too valuable an advantage to throw away. Nowadays, cryptography has advanced to the point where keeping Turing's work a secret no longer confers much advantage.

Turing was prescient in many ways. Not only did he set the paradigm for how digital computers work, but he understood that one day such machines might become so sophisticated that they were indistinguishable from intelligent beings. He was the first person to consider artificial intelligence (AI). Thinking about AI led him to construct one of the most famous thought experiments ever proposed. The Turing Test is not only a way to distinguish intelligence, it is actually a way of thinking about intelligence without getting bogged down in the details of how intelligence works. For Turing and many of us, the argument is that if a machine can communicate in a way that is it indistinguishable from a human being, then we must assume that it is intelligent, however it achieves this. It's a pragmatic definition of intelligence and one that leads to a practical threshold, beyond which all AI researchers wish to pass.

However underpinning the test are some assumptions about communication, language, and intelligence that I wish to examine. The first is that all human beings all seem to be considered good judges for the Turing Test. I think a good case can be made for considering this a false assumption. The second is the assumptions that mere word use is how we define not only intelligence, but language. Both of these are demonstrably false. If the assumptions the test is built on are false, then we need to rethink what the test is measuring, and whether we still feel this is a sufficient measure of intelligence.

Turing Judges.

The idea of the Turing Test is that a person sits at a teletype machine that prints texts and allows the operator to type text. The human and the test subject sit in different rooms and use the teletype machines to communicate. A machine can be said to pass the Turing Test if a human operator of the teletype cannot tell that the subject is not human. This puts word use at the forefront of Turing's definition of what it means to be intelligent.

Human beings use of language is indeed one of our defining features. Animals use faculties that hint at a proto-language facility. No animal uses language in the sense that we do. At best animals show one or two of the target properties that define language. They might for example have several grunts that indicate objects (often types of predator), but no syntax or grammar. There has been significant interest in programs that sought to teach apes to use language either as symbols or gestures. But most of this research has been discredited. Koko the gorilla was supposedly one of the most sophisticated language uses, but her "language" in fact consisted of rapidly cycling through the repertoire of signs, with the handler picking the signs that made most sense to them. In other experiments subtle cues from handlers told the animals what signs to use. More rigorous experiments show that chimps can understand some language, particularly nouns, but then so can grey parrots, some dogs, and other animals. Crucially they don't use language to communicate. In fact a far more impressive demonstration of intelligence is the ability of crows to improvise tools to retrieve food, or the coordinated pack hunting of aquatic mammals like orca and dolphins. So animals do not use language, but are none the less intelligent.

Humans are all at different levels when it comes to language use. Some of us are extraordinarily gifted with language and others struggle with the basics. The distinctions are magnified when we restrict language to just written words. This restriction alone is doubtful. Language as written language, even if used for a dialogue, is only small part of what language use consists of. A great deal of what we communicate in language is conveyed by tone of voice, facial expression, hand gestures, or body posture. Those people who can use written language well are rare. So a Turing judge is not simply distinguishing a machine from a human, but is placing a machine on a scale that includes novelists and football hooligans. What happens when the subject responds to any question by chanting "Oi, oi, oi, Come on you reds!"? Intelligence, particularly as measured by word use, is not a simple proposition.

The Turing Test using text alone would be more interesting if we could define in advance what elements would convince us that the generator of the text was human. To the best of my knowledge this has never been achieved. We don't know what criteria constitute a valid or successful test. We just assume that any generic human being is a good judge. There's no reason to believe that this is true. As I've mentioned many times now, individuals are actually quite poor at solo reasoning tasks (See An Argumentative Theory of Reason). Reason does not work the way they we thought it did. Mercier & Sperber have argued that at least one of the many fallacies that we almost inevitably fall prey to—confirmation bias—is a feature of reason, rather than a bug. M&S argue that this is because reason evolved to help small groups make decisions and those who make proposals think and argue differently to those who critique them. On this account, any given individual would most likely be a poor Turing judge.

Humans beings evolved to use language. Almost without exception, we all use it without giving it much thought. Certain disorders or diseases may prevent language use, but these stand out against the background of general language use: from the Amazon jungles to the African veldt, humans speak. The likelihood is that we've been using language for tens of thousands of years (See When Did Language Evolve?). But writing is another story. Writing is unusual amongst the world's languages, in that only a minority of living languages are written, or were before contact with Europe. Writing was absent from the Americas, from the Pacific, from Australia and New Guinea. The last two have hundreds of languages each. Unlike speaking, writing is something that we learn with difficulty. No child spontaneously begins to communicate in writing. Writing co-opts skills evolved for other purposes. And as a consequence our ability to use writing to express ourselves is extremely variable. Most people are not very good at it. Those who are, are usually celebrated as extraordinary individuals. Writers and their oeuvre are very important in literary cultures.

So to chose writing as the medium of a test for intelligence is an extremely doubtful choice. We don't expect intelligent human beings to be good at writing. Many highly intelligent people are lousy writers. We don't even expect people who are gifted speakers to be good at writing, which is why politicians do not write their own speeches! Writing is not a representative skill. Indeed it masks our inherent verbal skill.

In fact it might be better to use another skill altogether, i.e. tool making. A crow can modify found objects (specifically bending wire into a hook) to retrieve food items. Another important manifestation of intelligence is the ability to work in groups. Some orca, for example, coordinate their movements to create a bow-wave that can knock a seal off an ice-flow. This is a feat that involves considerable ability at abstract thought, and they pass this acquired knowledge onto to their offspring. The ability to fashion a tool or coordinate actions to achieve a goal are at least as interesting as manifestations of intelligence as language is.

Language and Recognition.

My landlady talks to her cats as though they understand her. She has one-sided conversations with them. Explains to them narratively when their behaviour causes her discomfort, as though they might understand and desist (they never do). She's not peculiar in this. Many people feel their pets are intelligent and can understand them even if they cannot speak. Why is this? Well, at least in part, it's because we recognise certain elements of posture in animals corresponding to emotions. The basic emotions are not so different in our pets that we cannot accurately understand their disposition: happy, content, excited, tired, frightened, angry, desire. With a little study we can even pick up nuances. A dog that barks with ears pinned back is saying something different to one that has its ears forward. A wagging tail or a purr can be a different signal depending on circumstances. A lot of it has to do with displays of and reception of affection.

Intelligence is not simply about words or language. Depending on our expectations the ability to follow instructions (dogs) or the ability to ignore instructions (cats) can be judged intelligent. The phrase emotional intelligence is now something of a cliché, but it tells us something very important about what intelligence is. A dog that responds to facial expressions, to posture and tone of voice is displaying intelligence of the kind that has a great deal of value to us. Some people value relationships with animals precisely because the communication is stuck at this level. A dog does not try to deceive or communicate in confusingly abstract terms. An animal broadcasts its own disposition ("emotions") without filtering and it responds directly to human dispositions. Many people would say that this type of relationship is more honest.

There's a terrible, but morbidly fascinating, neurological condition called Capgras Syndrome. In this condition a person can recognise the physical features of humans, but their ability to connect those features with emotions is compromised. Usually when one sees a familiar face there is an accompanying emotion that tells us what our relationship with the person is. If we feel disgust or anger on recognition, then we know them to be enemies, perhaps dangerous and we act to avoid or perhaps confront them. If the emotion is joy or love then we know it's a friend or loved one. In Capgras the emotional resonance is absent. With loved ones the absence of that emotion is so strange that the most plausible explanation often seems to be that these are mere replicas of loved ones, or lookalikes. The lack of emotion in response to a known face can be incapacitating in the sense of disrupting every existing relationship. In the classic novel, The Echo Maker, by Richard Powers, the man with Capgras is able to recognise and respond to his sister's voice on the telephone, but does not feel anything when he sees her. The same is true for his home and even his dog. The only way he can explain it is that they are all substitutes cleverly recreated to fool him. Only he isn't"fooled" which creates a nightmarish situation for him.

The problem, then, with the Turing Test is that it is rooted in the old Victorian conceit about reason being our highest faculty. Reason was, until quite recently, considered to float above the mere bodily processes of emotion. In other words it was very much caught up in Cartesian mind/body dualism and the metaphors associated with matter and spirit (See Metaphors and Materialism). Reason is associated, by default, with spirit, since it seems to be distinct from emotion. We now know that nothing could be further from the truth. Cut off from emotions our minds cannot function properly. We cannot make decisions, cannot assess information, and cannot take responsibility for our actions. The Turing test assumes that intelligence is an abstract quality, separable from the body. But these assumptions are demonstrably false.

What Kind of Intelligence?

I've already pointed out that language is more than words. I've expanded the idea of language to include the prosody, gesture and posture associated with the words (which as we know shapes the meaning of the words). An ironic eyebrow lift can make words mean something quite different than their face value. The ability to use and detect irony depends on non-verbal cues. This is why, for example, irony seldom works on Twitter. Text tends to be taken on face value, and attempts at irony simply cause misunderstanding. This is true in all text based media. In the absence of emotional cues we are forced to try to interpolate the disposition of the interlocutor. Getting a computer to work with irony would be an interesting test of intelligence!

Indeed trying to assess the internal disposition of the hidden interlocutor is a key aspect of the Turing Test. Faced with a Turing Test subject I suspect that most of us would ask questions designed to evoke emotional responses. This is because we intuit that what makes us human is not the words we use, but the feelings we communicate. Someone who acts without remorse is routinely referred to as "inhuman". In most cases humans are not good at making empathetic connections using text - which is why text-based online forums seem to be populated with borderline, if not outright, sociopaths. It's the medium, not the message. Personally I find that doing a lot of online communication produces a profound sense of alienation and brings out my underlying psycho-pathology. Writing an essay however is far more productive exercise than trying to dialogue in text. Even the telephone, with it's limited frequency range, is better for communicating, because tone of voice and inflection communicates sufficient to establish an empathetic connection.

So if a computer can play chess better than a human being (albeit with considerable help from a team of programmers) then that is impressive, but not intelligent. The computer plays well because it does not feel anything, does not have to respond to its environment (internal or external), and does not have any sense of having won or lost. It has nothing for us to relate to. Similarly, even if a computer ever managed to use language with any kind of facility, i.e. if it could form grammatically and idiomatically correct sentences, it would probably still seem inhuman because it would not share our concerns and values. It would not empathise with us, nor us with it.

I suppose that in the long run a computer might be able to simulate both language and an interest in our values so that in text form it might fool a human being. But would this constitute intelligence? I think not. A friendly dog would be more intelligent by far. Which is not to say that such a computer would not be a powerful tool. But we'd be better off using it to predict the weather or model a genome than trying to simulate what any of us, or any dog, can do effortlessly.

An argument against this point of view is that our minds are tuned to over-estimate intelligence or emotions in objects we see. So we see faces in clouds and agency in inanimate objects. So an approximation of intelligence would not have to be all that sophisticated to stimulate the emotions in us that would make us judge it intelligent. For example, in movies robots are often given a minimal ability to emote in order to make them sympathetic characters. The robot, Number five, in the film Short Circuit has "eyebrows" and an emotionally expressive voice and this is enough for us to empathise with it. So perhaps we will be easily fooled into believing in machine intelligence. But this means that simulation of intelligence is insufficiently impressive because people are easily fooled.

This point is brilliantly made in the movie Blade Runner. The Voight-Kampff test is designed to distinguish "replicants" from humans based on subtle differences in emotional responses. The replicants are otherwise indistinguishable from humans. The test of Rachael is particularly difficult because she has been raised to believe she is human (the logic of the movie breaks down to some extent because we do not learn by Deckard persists in asking 100 questions if Rachael is answering satisfactorily). Ridley Scott has muddied the waters further by suggesting that the blade runner, Deckard, is himself a replicant, though based on the original story and the context of the film this seems an unlikely twist.

So there are two major problems here: what makes a good Turing test; and who makes a good Turing judge. The whole set up seems under-defined and poorly thought out at present. My impression is that passing the Turing test as it is usually specified is a trivial matter that would tell us nothing about artificial intelligence or humanity that we do not already know.

Conclusion

It seems to me that we have many reasons to rethink the Turing Test. It seems to be rooted in a series of assumptions that are untenable in light of contemporary knowledge. As a test for intelligence the Turing Test no longer seems reasonable. On one hand the way that it defines intelligence is far too limited. The definition of intelligence it uses is rooted in Cartesian Dualism which sees intelligence as an abstract quality, not rooted in physicality, not embodied. And this is simply false. Emotions, as felt in the body, for example, play a key role in how we process information and make decisions.

As much as anything our decision on whether or not an entity is intelligent or not, will be based on how we feel about it, how interacting with it feels to us. We will compare the feeling of interacting with the unknown entity, to how it feels to interact with an intelligent being. And until it feels right we will not judge that entity intelligent.

In Turing's day we simply did not understand how decision making worked. We still thought of abstract reasoning as a detachable mental function unrelated to being embodied. We still saw reason as the antithesis of emotion. Now we know that emotion is an indivisible part of the process. We must now consider that reason itself may not have evolved for seeking truth, but merely for optimising decision making in small groups. At the very least, the lone teletype operator needs to be replaced with a group of people; and mere words must be replaced by tasks that involve creativity and cooperation. A machine ought to show the ability to cooperate with a human being to achieve a shared goal before being judged "intelligent". The idea that we can judge intelligence at arms length, rationally, dispassionately has little interest or value any more. We judge intelligence through interaction, physical interaction as much as anything.

As George Lakoff and his colleagues have shown, abstract thought is rooted in metaphors deriving from how we physically interact with the world. Our intelligence is embodied and the idea of disembodied intelligence is no longer tenable. As interesting as the idea may appear, there is no ghost in the machine that can be extracted or instantiated and maintained apart from the body. Any attempts to create disembodied intelligence will only result in a simulacrum, not in intelligence that we can recognise as such.

Buddhists will often smugly claim this as their own insight, though most Buddhists I know are crypto-dualists (most believe in life after death and karma for example). I've argued at length that the Buddha's insight was into the nature of experience and that he avoided drawing ontological conclusions. Thus, although we read the texts as being a critique of doctrines involving souls, the methods of Buddhism were always different from the methods of Brahmanism. The Brahmins sought to experience the ātman as a reality, and from the Upaniṣadic description ātman could be experienced as a sense of oneness or connection with everything in the world (oceanic boundary loss). Buddhists deconstructed experience itself to show that nothing in experience persisted and that therefore, even if there was a soul we must either always experience it, or it could never be experienced, and since we start off not experiencing it, no permanent soul can ever be experienced (which is not a comment on whether or not such a soul exists!). Therefore the experiences of the Brahmins are of something other than ātman. Only after Buddhists had started down the road of misguided ontological speculation did this become an opinion about the existence of a soul. So the superficial similarities between ancient Buddhist and modern scientific views is an accident of a philosophical wrong turn on the part of Buddhists. They got it partly right by accident, which is not really worth being smug over.

History shows that we must proceed with real caution here. Our Western views on intelligence have been subject to extreme bias in the past and this has led to some horrific consequences for those people who failed our tests for completely bogus reasons. We must constantly subject our views on intelligence to the most rigorous criticism and scepticism we are capable of. Our mistakes in this field ought to haunt us and make us extremely uncomfortable. This is yet another reason why tests for intelligence ought to require more interactivity. If we do create intelligence we need to know we can get along with it, and it with us. And we know that we have a poor record on this score.

The Turing Test seems not to have been updated to take account of what we know about ourselves nowadays. The test itself is anachronistic. The method is faulty, because it is based on a faulty understanding of intelligence and decision making. We are not even asking the correct question about intelligence. With all due respect to Alan Turing, he was a man of his time, a glorious pioneer, but we're moved on since he came up with this idea and it's had its day.

~~oOo~~

See also: Why Artificial Intelligences Will Never Be Like Us and Aliens Will Be Just Like Us. (27 June 2014)

Mantra of the Heart Sutra
in seal script
The Art of Calligraphy

Most people will know by now that the Heart Sūtra,《心經》 Xīnjīng, or Prajñāpāramitā-hṛdaya was composed in China using chunks of text from Kumārajīva's early fifth century translation of the Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrika-prajñāpāramitā-sūtra, i.e. 《摩訶般若波羅蜜經》T 223; combined with a dhāraṇī similar to that found in a translation of the Mahāmegha Sūtra, i.e. 《大方等無想經》 T 12.387; and an introduction featuring the bodhisattva par excellence, Avalokiteśvara or 觀自在 Guānzìzài.† As such the language of the Chinese text dates from what has been called the late Medieval period in China (600-1000 CE.) or a little before.

When we look at the Chinese versions of the text they are written in Chinese characters or 漢字(Hànzì). These same characters are still in use, mostly unchanged after all this time. One occasionally finds that characters that have become archaic, or taboo, or that have shifted in meaning, but on the whole the Heart Sutra Hànzì have not changed. But what has changed considerably is the pronunciation of the characters. The language of the Medieval period is known as Middle Chinese and it is very different from Mandarin and other modern Chinese languages. The Indian parallel is Middle-Indic of which Pāḷi is the best known example. Middle Chinese is still in the same language family as Mandarin, so have many of the same features such as use of tones, monosyllables, and grammatical relations. The differences include different tones and many different syllable final sounds including more use of consonants (similar to Cantonese). Buddhist Chinese also features transliterations of Prakrit and/or Sanskrit words, e.g. 般若波羅蜜多 bōrě-bōluómìduō for prajñā-pāramitā; and some transliteration/translation hybrids, e.g. 舍利子 Shèlìzi for the name Śāriputra, where 舍利 transliterates Śāri and 子 translates putra. Some of these transliterations only make sense in Middle-Chinese, eg Buddha is regular transliterated as 佛陀 Fótuó, nowadays almost always abbreviated to 佛 Fó. This makes more sense when we realise that in Middle Chinese 佛陀 was pronounced like bjut ta.

A number of schemes exist to transcribe Chinese using Roman letters. So we see 心 written as xīn, hsin, shin, etc. Most commonly these days scholars use the Pinyin system, which was proposed by the Chinese Government in the 1950s (fact check) and represents the Beijing accent. Pinyin can be used with diacritics to indicate tone, but is often used without (resulting in considerable ambiguity). It can sometimes be difficult to know which scheme scholars used in the past, because they almost never specified. The introduction of Unicode, making it easy to include non-Roman and non-standard characters in an electronic document, has greatly facilitated communication about these subjects because it is now easy to include Chinese characters in publications.

If you look up the Chinese pronunciation of the Xīnjīng you will almost always find the modern Mandarin transcription of the characters, rather than the pronunciation of the time it was composed. Mostly one sees the Mandarin version, or sometimes a Cantonese version. A character like 心 'heart' is pronounced xīn in Mandarin and sam in Cantonese, but was sim in Middle Chinese. Note that in Middle Chinese the relationship to Tibetan becomes more clear in this case. The corresponding Tibetan word is sems (pronounced sem) and a Proto-Sino-Tibetan root has been reconstructed as *siǝm. Tibetan sems, like Chinese 心 (below), is used to translate the Sanskrit word citta.

The pronunciation of earlier phases of Chinese is not obvious because the writing system was not phonetic. However pronunciation can be inferred from rhyming patterns in poems, and especially from the Chinese own attempts to analyse these in rhyming dictionaries from as early as the Sixth Century. Wikipedia has a reasonably good article on reconstructing old Chinese. It's important to remember also that Middle-Chinese was not one language or dialect, just as modern written Chinese can represent different dialects, so can Middle-Chinese. Thus one reconstruction is not going to represent all possible dialects or even all accents, just as English spelling does not.

There are various modern reconstructions of Middle Chinese pronunciation from written sources. I'll be basing this reconstruction on the book by Baxter & Sagart (2014) which contains 5000 characters. These authors insist on a number of caveats. Firstly there notation is not a definitive guide to pronunciation, but a transcription scheme like Pinyin. They do admit, "in most cases we can be confident that the distinctions [in the system] are not artificial and existed in some variety of Chinese at the time". Other authors have attempted a true phonetic reconstruction, but Baxter & Sagart remain wary of such efforts and suggest that a great deal more research would be required for a true phonetic reconstruction. (2014: 12). In addition Baxter and Sagart chose chose their notation to be ASCII friendly - i.e. so that it would be virtually independent of electronic platform.

The traditional way of describing a character is in terms of initial sound, final sound and tone. Middle Chinese tones don't correspond simply to Mandarin. There were four tones, though it's not entirely certain how these sounded:

平 píng < bjaeng 'level' - no mark
上 shǎng < dzangX 'rising' - final X
去 qù < khjoH 'departing' - final H
入 rù < nyip 'entering' - final -p -t or -k.

Initial glottal stop is indicated with an apostrophe. More information on the pronunciation of the reconstructions, and comparisons with other systems of reconstruction, can be found on the Wikipedia Middle Chinese page, The Baxter-Sagart transcription scheme can be found in the Wikipedia Reconstructions of Old Chinese page. Baxter and Sagart's tables are online here.

The text reconstructed below is 《心經》 T 251, attributed to Xuanzang (玄奘). The Chinese characters are followed by the Pinyin romanisation, the reconstructed Middle Chinese, and finally my translation. At the end I'll include the Middle Chinese version as a whole. Where a character's pronunciation has not been reconstructed by Baxter & Sagart, I've looked at Pulleyblank (1991), Digital Dictionary of Buddhism (which includes Middle Chinese pronunciation but no source information), and the Wiktionary entry (which includes information from a variety of named sources) to get an alternative and used red text to indicate these.

Given the state of our knowledge, there are inevitably some gaps and some uncertainties regarding tone. I think such a project will be intrinsically interesting and those with knowledge and skill will hopefully take up this first effort and improve on it.

† Avalokiteśvara is better known in Chinese by the translation used by Kumārajīva: 觀世音 Guānshìyīn 'watching the sounds of the world' (cf T 250). This was shortened to 觀音Guānyīn. It is sometimes said to be because of the death of the Emperor Taizong of Tang Dynasty (唐太宗; 599-649) to avoid uttering one of the characters in his personal name 李世民 Lǐ Shìmín. This is a traditional form of Chinese taboo, but that it applies in this case is disputed. Indeed the word 世 'world' is so common it would be hard to avoid it completely. The form 觀自在 Guānzìzài ('watching one's existence') was introduced by Xuánzàng. However they may also reflect a change in the underlying Sanskrit name, dating from about the 5th century. The name was originally Avalokita-svara ('examined sounds') and changed to Avalokita-īśvara 'examined lord'; a-ī > e according to Sanskrit rules) after the figure absorbed some of the attributes of the god Śiva, including the epithet Īśvara.

心經

Xīn jīng

Sim keng

Heart Sutra

觀自在菩薩行深般若波羅蜜多時，
guān zì zài pú sà, xíng shēn bō rě bō luó mì duō shí
kwan dzijH xawX bo sal hang syim ba nya ba ra mil da dzyi
When Avalokiteśvara bodhisattva practiced the deep perfection of wisdom,

照見五蘊皆空，度一切苦厄。
zhào jiàn wǔ yùn, jiē kōng dù yī qiè kǔ è
tsyewH kenH nguX on, keaj khuwng, duH 'jit tshet khuX 'eak
He saw the five aggregates as completely empty, and overcame all states of suffering.

舍利子色不異空，空不異色；
Shè lì zi sè bù yì kōng, kōng bù yì sè;
syaeX lijH tsiX srik pjuw yiH khuwng, khuwng pjuw yiH srik
Śāriputra, form is not different emptiness, emptiness is not different form

色即是空，空即是色。

Sè jí shì kōng, kōng jí shì sè.
srik tsik dzyeX khuwng, khuwng tsik dzyeX srik
Form is empty, emptiness is form.

* Middle Chinese uses the same character 空 for empty and emptiness. The Sanskrit mss sources disagree on the correct interpretation of this line

受、想、行、識，亦復如是。
Shòu, xiǎng, xíng, shi, yì fù rú shì
dzyuwX sjangX hang syik, yek bjuwH nyo dzyeX.

Vedanā, saṃjñā, saṃskāra, & vijñāna, are the same

舍利子是諸法空相，
Shè lì zi Shì zhū fǎ kōng xiāng,
syaeX lijH tsiX dzyeX tsyo pjop khuwng sjang
Śāriputra, all dharmas are marked with emptiness;

不生不滅，不垢不淨，不增不減。
bù shēng bù miè, bù gòu bù jìng, bù zēng bù jiǎn.
pjuw sraeng pjuw mjiet pjuw gu pjuw dzjengH pjuw tsong pjuw heamX

not born, not dying; not dirty, not clean; not increasing, not diminishing

是故，空中無色，無受、想、行、識；
Shì gù, kōng zhōng wú sè, wú shòu, xiǎng, xíng, shi;
dzyeX kuH khuwng trjuwng mju srik mju dzyuwX sjangX hang syik,
Therefore: in emptiness there is no form; no feeling, no thought, going? [choice], knowledge

無眼、耳、鼻、舌、身、意；
Wú yǎn, ěr, bí, shé, shēn, yì;
mju ngeanX nyiX bjijH zyet syin 'iH
No eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, or mind;

無色、聲、香、味、觸、法；
Wú sè, shēng, xiāng, wèi, chù, fǎ;
mju srik syeng xjang mjəjH tsyhowk pjop
No colour, sound, smell, taste, touch or dharmas.

無眼界，乃至無意識界；
Wú yǎn jiè, nǎi zhì wú yì shí jiè;
mju ngeanX keajH nojX tsyijH mju 'iH syik keajH
no eye-element, up to no mind-cognition element

無無明亦無無明盡，
Wú wú míng yì wú wú míng jǐn,
mju mju mjaeng yek mju mju mjaeng tsinX
Also no ignorance of exhausting of ignorance.

乃至無老死亦無老死盡；
Nǎi zhì wú lǎo sǐ yì wú lǎo sǐ jǐn;
nojX tsyijH mju lawX sijX yek mju lawX sijX tsinX
And even no aging and death, no exhausting of aging and death

無苦、集、滅、道；無智，亦無得。
Wú kǔ, jí, miè, dào; wú zhì, yì wú dé.
mju khuX dzip mjiet dawH mju trjeH yek mju tok
No suffering, cause, cessation or way. No wisdom, also no attainment

以無所得故，菩提薩埵依般若波羅蜜多故，
Yǐ wú suǒ dé gù, pútísàduǒ yī bōrěbōluómìduō gù,
yiX mju srjoX tok kuH bo-dej-sal-twa yiX ba nya ba ra mil da kuH
Since nothing is attained, the bodhisattva reliant on perfection of wisdom,

心無罣礙。無罣礙故，無有恐怖，
Xīn wú guà ài. Wú guà ài gù, wú yǒu kǒng bù,
Sim mju gwae ae. mju gwae ae kuH, mju hjuwX khjowngX po,
his heart is without hindrance. Since he is not hindered, he is not afraid,

遠離顛倒夢想，究竟涅槃。
yuǎn lí diān dǎo mèng xiǎng, jiù jìng niè pán.
hjwonX lje ten tawX mjuwngH sjangX kjuwH kjaengH yeol ban
far from upside-down dreamlike thinking and finally attains nirvana

三世諸佛依般若波羅蜜多故，
Sān shì zhū fú yī bō rě bō luó mì duō gù,
sam syejH tsyo bjut 'j+j ba nya ba ra mil da kuH
All Buddhas of the three worlds depending on the perfection of wisdom,

得阿耨多羅三藐三菩提。
de ā nòu duō luó sān miǎo sān pú tí.
tok 'a nuwH da ra sam mak sam bo dej
attain anuttara-samyak-sambodhi.

故知般若波羅蜜多，
Gù zhī bō rě bō luó mì duō,
kuH trje ba nya ba ra mil da
Therefore know the perfection of wisdom,

是大神咒，是大明咒，
shì dà shén zhòu, Shì dà míng zhòu,
dzyeX dajH zyin ju dzyeX dajH mjaeng ju
is a great magical spell, is a great spell,

是無上咒，是無等等咒，
shì wú shàng zhòu, shì wú děng děng hòu
dzyeX mju dzyangX ju dzyeX mju tongX tongX ju
an unsurpassed spell, an unequalled spell.

能除一切苦真實不虛，
Néng chú yī qiè kǔ zhēn shí bù xū
noj drjo 'jit tshet khuX tsyin zyit pjuw khjo
It removes all suffering; it is truly real not false ,

故說般若波羅蜜多咒。
Gù shuō bō rě bō luó mì duō zhòu,
kuH seol ba nya ba ra mil da ju
Therefore, recite the perfection of wisdom spell.

即說咒曰：
Jí shuō zhòu yuē:
tsik seol ju hjwot
That is to say the mantra which goes:

揭帝　揭帝般羅揭帝般羅僧揭帝　
Jiē dì jiē dì bō luó jiē dì bō luó sēng jiē dì
gjet tejH gjet tejH puɑn la gjet tejH puɑn la seung gjet tejH
gate gate paragate parasamgate

菩提　薩婆訶*

pú tí sà pó hē
bo dej sal ba xa
bodhi svaha

* Note. There are two different versions of the last word. The CBETA version of T 251 ends 僧莎訶 sēng shā hē, which is a transliteration of the Sanskrit word svāhā. However the print editions of the Taishō notes that the Song, Yuan and Ming versions of the Tripiṭaka all had 薩婆訶 sà pó hē, where the two characters 萨婆 approximate the Sanskrit conjunct syllable sva. Since this makes for a better rendering of the Sanskrit svāhā, I've adopted it here.

Middle Chinese Heart Sūtra

Sim Keng

kwan dzijH xawX bo sal hang syim ba nya ba ra mil da dzyi

tsyewH kenH nguX on keaj khuwng, duH 'jit tshet khuX 'eak
syaeX lijH tsiX srik pjuw yiH khuwng, khuwng pjuw yiH srik
srik tsik dzyeX khuwng, khuwng tsik dzyeX srik
dzyuwX sjangX hang syik, yek bjuwH nyo dzyeX.
syaeX lijH tsiX dzyeX tsyo pjop khuwng sjang
pjuw sraeng pjuw mjiet pjuw gu pjuw dzjengH pjuw tsong pjuw heamX
dzyeX kuH khuwng trjuwng mju srik mju dzyuwX sjangX hang syik,
mju ngeanX nyiX bjijH zyet syin 'iH
mju srik syeng xjang mjəjH tsyhowk pjop
mju ngeanX keajH nojX tsyijH mju 'iH syik keajH
mju mju mjaeng yek mju mju mjaeng tsinX nojX tsyijH mju lawX sijX yek mju lawX sijX tsinX
mju khuX dzip mjiet dawH mju trjeH yek mju tok
yiX mju srjoX tok kuH bo-dej-sal-twa yiX ba-nya-ba-ra -mil-da kuH
sim mju gwae ae. mju gwae ae kuH, mju hjuwX khjowngX po,
hjwonX lje ten tawX mjuwngH sjangX kjuwH kjaengH yeol ban
sam syejH tsyo bjut 'j+j ba nya ba ra mil da kuH
tok 'a nuwH da ra sam mak sam bo dej
kuH trje ba nya ba ra mil da
dzyeX dajH zyin ju dzyeX dajH mjaeng ju
dzyeX mju dzyangX ju dzyeX mju tongX tongX ju
noj drjo 'jit tshet khuX tsyin zyit pjuw khjo
kuH seol ba nya ba ra mil da ju
tsik seol ju hjwot
gjet tejH gjet tejH puɑn la gjet tejH puɑn la seung gjet tejH bo dej sal ba xa

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

The Chinese text comes from the CBETA version of the Taishō edition of the Chinese Tipiṭaka.

Baxter, William H. and Sagart, Laurent. (2014) Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction. Oxford University Press.

Pulleyblank (1991), Lexicon of reconstructed pronunciation in early Middle Chinese, late Middle Chinese, and early Mandarin. University of British Columbia Press.

In researching karma and rebirth I came across an interesting article by well known scholar of religion, Paul J. Griffiths. It dates from 1982 and while there was some immediate response from one scholar and the article has been cited a number of times, the ideas in the article seem to end up going nowhere. I read recently that 90% of humanities articles are never cited!

One of the main points made in the Griffiths article is that there is very little critical evaluation of Buddhist philosophy or Buddhist ideas more generally. My own reading on the subject of karma has turned up few critical articles (see Bibliography). What's missing, according to Griffiths, is a critical engagement with Buddhist ideas. By this he specifically means a genuine attempt to assess the validity of truth claims made by Buddhists (1982: 277).

Scholarly publications on Buddhism seem to fall into a number of categories:

Descriptive works which are concerned with continuing to flesh out the history of Buddhism and to describe the intricacies of this complex subject. The opening up of Chinese Buddhist studies and comparison of Chinese, Gāndhārī and Pali versions of the early Buddhist texts mean that this descriptive phase of Buddhist studies will continue for the foreseeable future.
Apologetics, that is works whose aim is to defend a Buddhist worldview in some form. We have both religious apologists who seek to retain the traditional elements of Buddhism, and secular apologists whose views are broadly aligned with a Buddhist tradition and who write in such a way as to bolster traditional readings, particularly of history.
Polemics of the field of Buddhist Studies itself, which are aimed not at Buddhism per se, but at the hubris of scholars making claims based on texts which contain far more uncertainly, ambiguity or down right incoherence than Buddhist Studies scholars like to admit. At best these result in more sophisticated articles of type 1.
Ideological polemics aimed Buddhism, which essentially criticise Buddhism for not being, for example, Christian, Vedic, or Marxist enough.

There's quite a bit of work which is comparative, especially recently comparative ethics, which seeks to find points of cross-over between Buddhist thought and the Western Intellectual tradition. These seem to combine descriptive and apologetic modes of writing. It's a mode of positively engaging with Buddhism, but it never really gets down to assessing the truth claims made by Buddhists.

There is a large gap in the market when it comes to the kind of critical attention that Griffiths has in mind. And in an age where the claims of religion are increasingly challenged head on, it is surprising that Buddhism appears to be escaping the kind of scrutiny that atheists are directing to Christianity (which may simply be a measure of how unimportant Buddhism is in the West). Although Griffiths was writing more than 30 years ago, very little appears to have changed. There is almost no critical engagement with Buddhism in the Academy and yet at the same time attention is lavished on Buddhism. This might be because disproving the truth claims of Buddhists would be killing the goose that laid the golden egg for scholars of Buddhism (though the survival of the field since Griffiths is a counterargument to this). Many people see the criticisms that I propose, for example, as "destroying" Buddhism (at the very least I regularly have people tell me that I am not really a Buddhist). Another factor is that many scholars of Buddhism are clearly in love with their subject and have all of the objectivity of the love struck. They can hardly be expected to criticise their love interest.

Another explanation is that we have adopted the anthropologist's disinterested, objective stance. I recall discussing this with an anthropologist friend who did her post-graduate work on stupa building projects in New Zealand and Australia. She showed me pictures from her Australian group which showed physical relics of the Buddha and the previous Buddha. I scoffed, since at best the previous Buddha is a myth, but she told me that her stance was to accept that this is what they believed and to focus on how this belief affected their lives and actions. The fact that they venerated such "relics" was more interesting than the truth of their claims. Assessing the belief played no part in her approach to research. Her work is thus mainly descriptive. Such is also true for those whose focus is historical or linguistic.

My impression is that it's not just Buddhism. The whole field of Indology skirts around the problem. Of course criticising Indian thought is a political minefield. Another problem for Western scholars who positively engage with Indian thought is that they risk being labelled as racists or cultural imperialists. Professors Michael Witzel and Wendy Doniger for example regularly suffer these canards, largely because their work does not satisfy the criteria of nationalists.

Doing Philosophy with Buddhism

Problems emerge when we engage with Buddhist ideas as philosophers. There is a great deal published now on the subject of Buddhist (or Indian) philosophy and the history of Buddhist ideas. As philosophers we cannot be content with a descriptive approach. We have an imperative to weigh the claims of Buddhists to see if they are true, or to what extent they are true. And if they are not true, then we have an obligation to say so, and to make a case for abandoning the claim. It's very difficult for Buddhists to do honest philosophy when we are in love with Buddhism. We are too strongly subject to cognitive bias. The same is true for many scholars of Buddhism. Personally, I found the intellectual weakness of Buddhist teaching, and in particular the teaching I had received directly, quite shocking once I began to study the history of Buddhist ideas in earnest (I think of Professor Gombrich's 2006 Numata lectures as a watershed in this sense).

Some Buddhist bloggers have taken up the challenge, to some extent: e.g. myself, David Chapman, and Glenn Wallis (and others who used his blog as a vehicle; with whom my relationship is complicated). But we are not always consistent, or always coherent, and we all have different approaches and agendas. One thing we all have in common is limited success in engaging mainstream Buddhists. There's very little interest from the wider Buddhist community, who almost universally prefer to read confirmation of their beliefs rather than challenges. The most popular Buddhist blogs simply reflect Buddhists beliefs back to them. Thus those of us who write critically about Buddhism, are either preaching to the converted or to the birds.

What makes Griffiths interesting is that he is trying to do philosophy with Buddhist ideas, rather than trying to justify a religious view. And this means that his paper is one of the most interesting articles ever published on Buddhist philosophy. It is certainly a relief from the steady stream of (re)interpretations of Nāgārjuna's impenetrable jargon-filled jumble. Not only do the least interesting philosophers of Buddhism seem to get all the attention, but we seldom seem to get to the nub of the issues they were grappling with.

There was a response to Griffiths (1982) from White (1983) and then a rebuttal from Griffiths (1984), but little beyond that. Bronkhorst has tackled the problem of teleology in Indian conceptions of karma across the board (2000). More recently Cho (2014) has joined the discussion from an interesting angle. In response to attempts to jettison karma by secularists he argues that Westerners have failed to understand how traditional cultures make use of karma. Meanwhile apologetics continue to multiply: e.g. Thanissaro, Bodhi, Sangharakshita, and Vessantara's resent essays Some Problems with Not Believing in Rebirth & More on Rebirth.

Griffiths acknowledges that there is a difficult apprenticeship to grapple with the subject. It requires at least some familiarity with a number of scriptural languages. Griffiths's own article suffers from a common complaint, which is over-reliance on Vasubandhu's Abhidharmakośabhāṣya as a source book on sectarian Buddhist views. This general over-reliance on the Bhāṣya is because most of the surviving source material is only available in Chinese translation. Sanskritists and Palists have historically not had the Chinese language skills to match. It's not surprising as mastering these languages takes years of effort (it takes about 5 years to get really confident in Sanskrit), though this is changing.

Griffiths Thesis

Griffiths distinguishes three major functions of karma in Buddhism (280):

as an "explanatory cosmogonic hypothesis"; the universe as created by volitional acts.
as an "explanatory hypothesis for the varied states and conditions of sentient beings"; why we are human, why some have good/bad fortunes.
as a means of social control in Buddhist societies; "acting as a powerful mechanism for regulating and enforcing the essentially hierarchical structure of Buddhist societies and of providing a rationale for Buddhist soteriological practice..."

From these functions Griffiths derives seven truth claims, seven propositions that have to be true if the Buddhist account of karma is to be judged true as a whole (in the article they are labelled P 1-7). Griffiths is at pains to say that he has no space for a full treatment of these propositions. However, for our purposes even a superficial analysis is useful. In this essay I will focus on the propositions that Griffith deduces from the second major function.

In my previous essays I have already showed that Buddhist cosmogony cannot be taken literally, thus the propositions (P1 & P2 n Griffiths notation) that derive from this function are not very interesting since they are patently false. If it once provided Buddhists with a satisfactory account of the origin of the universe then it does not now do so. Griffiths emphasises this when he shows that for the karma theory of the origin of the universe to be true, it means sentient beings must precede the origin of the universe, which is nonsensical.

The propositions (P6 & P7) associated with the third, regulatory, function probably do help to regulate Buddhists societies as long as they are treated as being true. Traditionally Buddhists have believed in a supernatural function of the universe, which correlates past actions to present vedanā and future punarbhava or rebirth. In fact my own work has already shown that Buddhists did not come up with a completely coherent account of this function. But a coherent narrative is perhaps less important than a compelling narrative when it comes to motivating people to ethical behaviour.

This brings us to the truth claims for the second function. These seem to me to be the most important claims made by Buddhists. As an explanation for our present state, Griffiths suggests that the Buddhist theory of karma makes the following truth claims (282, paraphrased):

P3 Each individual undergoes more than one life.

P4 The parameters for any individual are set at conception and result from actions in previous lives.

P5 There is no undeserved suffering.

As critical readers we must not only assess the validity of the author's conclusions, but also the strength of the reasoning involved and the validity of this starting propositions. We need to be clear that the basis of this account of karma is Vasubandhu's Abhidharmakośabhāṣya. I have a serious objection to P5, but let us work through Griffith's argument.

Multiple lives

P3 Each individual undergoes more than one life.

Griffiths argues that if define an individual as having physical continuity in time, then P3 is incoherent since death clearly disrupts physical continuity. A soul inhabiting many bodies is unacceptable to Buddhists. Buddhists conceive of an individual as a series of psycho-physical events (khandhas). In this view death is not an interruption to the series, even though the individual body ceases. I've already discussed Vasubandhu's approach to rebirth to some extent. He believed that rebirth occurred an appreciable time after death if only to account for the time taken for vijñāṇa to travel from one physical location to another. Vasubandhu was against instantaneous arising of vijñāṇa elsewhere.

As such Griffiths reformulates P3 as

P3' Any given caused continuum of momentary states exhibiting sentience (i.e. an individual) does not cease with death (283).

This allows Buddhists to eliminate any tendency to postulate a more substantial something which dies and is reborn. Griffiths notes, as I have done, that Buddhists are likely to assert P3' when they are concerned with social control and as the basis of morality. If actions have consequences, but the consequences are lived by someone else, then that is no motivation for morality. Thus Buddhists discussing morality emphasise personal continuity. Whereas Buddhists discussing metaphysics and identity stress mere processes.

A corollary of P3' is that all moments of being are simply moments in a series. In the strong form of this idea, identity is always merely contingent. In fact there are no individuals. It's a moot point to claim that at any two moments any two "individuals" are linked at all. Without the sense of continuity, the concept of an individual, the concept of individual responsibility for actions, breaks down.

I would add that this was Nāgārjuna's ultimate argument against mainstream Buddhist karma theories:

karma cen nāsti kartā ca kutaḥ syāt karmajaṃ phalam |
asaty atha phale bhoktā kuta eva bhaviṣyati || MMK_17.30 ||

If there is no agent and no action, could their be result born of action?
In the absence of a fruit, how can there be one who suffers the result?

...

kleśāḥ karmāṇi dehāś ca kartāraś ca phalāni ca |
gandharvanagarākārā marīcisvapnasaṃnibhāḥ || MMK_17.33 ||

Defilements, actions, forms, agents and fruits;
Are like a Gandharva city, like a mirage or a dream.

All the talk of morals is just an upāya, a lie that is justified by compassion. However Griffiths argues that neither P3 nor P3' stand up to criticism and are in fact both false, because the whole idea of an individual is false in the strict reading of Buddhist metaphysics. Taken to it's logical extreme we get to Nāgārjuna's conclusion, that ultimately none of these ideas constitutes a substantial reality. Nothing is what it seems and the idea that anything could persist long enough to earn the title "individual" is simply wrong. Ergo, there is no one to reap the fruit of actions, no one to be reborn. Here we see precisely why other Buddhists considered Nāgārjuna to be a nihilist. However, barred from any form of Realism (Sarvāstivāda and Pudgalavāda notwithstanding) Buddhists seeking an alternative to Nāgārjuna's perceived nihilism, fell into forms of idealism, specifically citta-matra, the idea that there is only mind.

Time and again when this idea comes up, Buddhists cite researchers into paranormal phenomenon such as Ian Stevenson or Jim Tucker. I've dealt with some of the problems of this kind of research previously: Rebirth and the Scientific Method (1 Oct 2010) and Rebirth is Neither Plausible nor Salient (27 Jan 2012). What Stevenson in particular thought he had evidence for was reincarnation. The same soul returning to be incarnated in a new body. If this were true then the whole edifice of Buddhist metaphysics would be broken, since we vehemently deny that existence of a soul and the very possibility of reincarnation (Tibetan tulku's notwithstanding).

Influence of Previous Lives

P4 The parameters for any individual are set at conception

and result from actions in previous lives.

By parameters Griffiths means state of congenital health, intelligence, physical appearance, i.e. all the factors that we would now ascribe to genetic inheritance from our parents. Not included, is what we will make of our lives within these givens. Clearly if the propositions P3 and P3' are false, then P4 must also be false, since it is predicated on P3 (previous lives). However, as Griffiths notes, Buddhist karma theory is not strictly deterministic. On this basis he is willing to grant that actions in a previous life might have influenced this life, with the caveat that the mechanisms suggested by Buddhists are hardly credible.

It may be that Griffiths was not writing from a very informed position on genetics, or that in 1982 genetics seemed a less promising science. This was before the sequencing of the human genome for example. But from my point of view, Griffiths is far too generous on this point. Even if we take in the newish field of epigenetics, which (re)opens the door to Lamarckian passing on of passing on learned characteristics or at least parental responses to environmental conditions, the idea of influence from one life to another is no longer credible.

I've outlined Sean Carroll's argument against this and have yet to see any Buddhist attempt a refutation. Basically, if the body is made of atoms that hold the information which makes up our personality and memories, the second law of thermodynamics means that the information cannot survive our death. Additionally if there were other forces that could affect matter in any perceptible way we would have found them by now. The argument against this is typically dualistic. Mind stuff is different from matter stuff. However for mind stuff to be interesting it would have to interact with matter stuff, since mental events always have a material correlates. Such interactions would be detectable and thus since we do not detect them we have a strong argument against a separate mind stuff. There is only one kind of stuff.

Thus Griffiths was too soft on Buddhists in this part of his argument. Hereditary does indeed set the parameters for our present lives, but there is no evidence that this has anything to do with having lived before. Our parameters are set by our particular recombination of our parents DNA, a few epigenetic factors and the environment we develop in. The combination of hereditary and environment explain everything about us without the need to invoke previous lives.

When one looks at afterlife beliefs they are almost always tied to the idea that the universe is moral or ethical. An afterlife is required to deal with the patent unfairness of life. And this brings us to proposition five.

Suffering.

P5 There is no undeserved suffering.

This proposition is not logically contradictory or incoherent in itself. However, in Buddhism it is always tied to the previous propositions. One could hold this view independently of Buddhist truth claims (many conservatives appear to hold this view for example), but according to Griffiths, traditionally Buddhists always combined them. Indeed the attractiveness of Buddhist karma as an explanatory power is precisely for the kinds of extreme circumstances cited by Griffiths: e.g. the suffering of infants who have had no chance to commit the kinds of deeds that might warrant suffering a punishment (there's an assumption here that suffering can be deserved or undeserved, but we'll have to take it on face value for now). Explaining undeserved suffering has been a major feature of all religious moral narratives, which are necessarily predicated on the idea of deserved suffering. However, I think Griffiths has missed some subtly here. Buddhists have a variety of responses. While Tibetan Buddhists appear to believe that everything that happens is a result of karma, and this accept that the suffering infant must have been evil in a past life; the Pāḷi texts make it clear that karma does not account for illness, only for birth in the human realm where one is subject to illness and suffering.

I'm not aware of any traditional narratives from the Pāḷi to explain infant suffering, but there are several stories which purport to show how one might deal with the death of a child. I'm thinking particularly of the Piyajātikā Sutta in which a man has lost his child and the Buddha simply tells him: that's just how it is (evametam evametam). The other stand out example is the story of Kisā Gotamī who loses her child, but is brought to a gentle understanding that death, even of an infant, is simply part of life one just has to learn to accept. None of the texts I am aware of attribute apparently undeserved suffering, such as the suffering of infants, to actions in a previous life. The one example of an infant suffering that comes to mind, is in the story of Aṅgulimala in which the eponymous character relieves the suffering of a mother having a difficult birth by using the magic of truth (I discuss this in Attwood 2014). Nothing in the story, in either it's Pāḷi or Chinese versions, suggests blame was apportioned to the infant. Aṅgulimala's suffering is a result of evil deeds in this life!

In my research on the inevitability of karma (Attwood 2014) I drew attention to a major change in how karma worked from the early Buddhist texts to the later texts. At first karma is absolutely inescapable. One must always live with the consequences of one's actions. This is very strongly emphasised. But gradually this criteria of karma is abrogated and ways to mitigate the effects of karma and to avoid them all together become mainstream Buddhism. The acme of this idea is the Tantrika chanting the Vajrasattva Mantra to eliminate any and all bad karma.

The fact is that even were the Buddhist theory of karma correct, there would be no way to link present suffering to past actions, because we do not have knowledge of those past actions. However, this limitation has not stopped Buddhists from constructing narratives which attribute present suffering to past actions in the form of Jātaka stories. These are mainly pious homilies which draw on the wider Indian culture (some of the stories also occur in Jaina and Brahmanical texts). Precisely this ability to see how past actions contribute to present suffering is one of the supernatural abilities which are attributed to the Buddha. This god-like ability is necessary for the Buddha to function as Buddhist saviour. In one view of this, the Buddha cannot be in the dark about this as we are, else we could not break free of suffering. He has to know how to act in order to not cause suffering. Since natural sources of knowledge cannot reveal this, the Buddha has to have supernatural knowledge. This is an example of a teleological argument of the type critiqued by Bronkhorst (2000).

Ultimately Griffiths rejects P5 on the basis that it is connected with P3. He also suggests that it is repugnant to most Western eyes and "certainly to Christians". However I find the latter an extremely weak argument. The karmic explanation is no less repugnant than the idea that an omnipotent God allows an infant to suffer, or causes that suffering, as part of some cosmic plan. Centuries of Christian arguments over Theodicy show that many Christians found there own narratives of apparently undeserved suffering equally repugnant. Griffith's objectivity has slipped here.

Conclusion

Griffiths' own conclusion is that the philosophy of karma, as represented in the Bhāṣya does not stand up. He concludes:

"The empirical falsification of P1 and P2, the partial incoherence of P3 and its variant P3', the falsity of P4 in so far as it depends on P3/P3', the empirical falsification and moral repugnance of P5, and the vacuousness of P6 and P7 -- all these mean that Buddhist karmic theory as expounded in the major theoretical works devoted to it must be false." (291. Emphasis added)

I am in broad agreement with Griffiths, with some caveats as stated above. In some cases I find the case has strengthened over time. The empirical evidence against any kind of afterlife is much stronger in 2015 than it was in 1982. This is not to say that it is not possible to formulate a Buddhist theory of karma that is true, but that the traditional accounts are not true. Also any new formulation of karma must deal with the objections raised in the article.

As Griffiths points out, this may "pose many urgent questions for Buddhists". I suggested at the outset, such criticisms have largely been ignored. Those who write, for example, about Buddhist ethics do not seem to take a critical stance on traditional Buddhist moral philosophy. A great deal is written for example on whether Buddhist ethics is a virtue ethic or a consequentialist ethic, but very little about the fundamental validity of the worldview. And because we never really come to grips with the flaws in Buddhist thinking, we can never move on. Those who do write about it are marginal, if not marginalised. Dayāmati has asked why it even matters what kind of ethics Buddhism has in relation to the Western intellectual tradition.

One response is to quietly drop the subject of karma because of the supernatural aspect of it, which some people reject out of hand. Having rejected karma, one can then describe a secular humanist ethic with a Buddhist flavour: retaining the five or ten precepts, but explaining them in secular humanist terms. This suffers from the problem that many people identify in my own writing. A secular humanist account of ethics, albeit with a Buddhist flavour, is secular humanism rather than Buddhism. Isn't it? If the underlying account of ethics is humanists, then the Buddhism is just window dressing or marketing. Certainly actions having consequences is no more a revelation in the Western intellectual tradition than is "everything changes". It's another case of "So what?" Defining what is Buddhist about Buddhist ethics in the absence of the supernatural elements is difficult. Buddhist ethics is predicated, as Griffiths suggests, on certain truth claims. Truth claims that turn out not to be true.

Coming back to the broader point about assessing truth claims, we can of course point to the efforts to research the effects of the practices known collectively as "mindfulness". On his blog, Justin Whitaker has written a useful summary of the latest round of recriminations against mindfulness, Buddhist mindfulness, morality, and Protestant presumptions. There is also criticism of the research into the effectiveness of mindfulness along the lines that it suffers from confirmation bias (unlike the rest of Buddhism?). There is a growing body of research and as long as it does not seal itself off from the outside world, like say paranormal research, then the scientific method will eventually sort out any kinks. These things take time. It is mildly interesting to see Buddhists attacking innovation and genuine attempts at scientific assessment, since this is exactly what we expect from a religious community. It confirms the problems that religious style thinking produces and highlights the clash with Enlightenment thinking.

If Buddhism is to have a future then we need to create an intellectual culture of open minded questioning and testing. At present, Buddhists are nice enough, but on the whole they don't ask the hard questions and they appear to dislike being asked hard questions by outsiders. And those who do ask hard questions are treated as apostates and outsiders. The problem is that a lot of what we take for granted as timeless truth is at best "a skilful means" and at worst simply false. But rather than face up to this and think about how to respond, most Buddhists are hiding their heads in the sand and pretending that such discussions are not happening. Of course the level of investment many Buddhists have in old ideas is enormous. For some, their whole identity is built on propounding "ancient truths" and all that. Scholars of Buddhism appear to be colluding with Buddhists in this. But it means that there is a huge amount of inertia. This calls for patience and compassion on the part of critical philosophers as we proceed to have this discussion that so many would rather not have.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Attwood, Jayarava (2014). Escaping the Inescapable: Changes in Buddhist Karma. Journal of Buddhist Ethics, 21. http://blogs.dickinson.edu/buddhistethics/2014/06/04/changes-in-buddhist-karma/

Bronkhorst, Johannes (2000). Karma and Teleology: A Problem and its Solutions in Indian philosophy. Tokyo: International Institute for Buddhist Studies. 2000. (Studia Philologica, Monograph Series, XV.) http://is.gd/Z85330

Cho, Francisca. (2014) Buddhism, Science, and the Truth About Karma. Religion Compass. 8(4): 117–127. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/rec3.12103

Griffiths, Paul J. (1982) Notes Towards a Critique of Buddhist Karma Theory. Religious Studies 18: 277-291. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0034412500014128

Griffiths, Paul J. (1984) Karma and personal identity: a response to Professor White. Religious Studies 20(3): 481-485. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0034412500016334

Hayes, Richard P. (1989) Can Sense be Made of the Buddhist Theory of Karma? [Paper read at the Dept of Philosophy, Brock University]. http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes/karma_brock.pdf

White, J. E. (1983) Is Buddhist Karmic Theory False? Religious Studies. 19(2):223-228. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0034412500015055

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.

The title of the sutta is Attakārī Sutta AN 6.38 (AN iii.337-8). The adjective atta-kārin and noun atta-kāra are central to the text so let us first pause to consider what they mean. Attan (atta- in compounds; ātman in Sanskrit) is, of course, the reflexive pronoun 'self, own'. It's not being used here in the sense of a metaphysical self. It is being used in an empirical sense: the experiential self, or, for the finicky, the physical locus of awareness and intention, broadly speaking the body ('body' is one of the meanings of Vedic ātman). Since the text itself provides the argument for this, we'll let it speak first. The other part of the compound is kāra'act, deed'. Like the world karma it stems from the verbal root √kṛ'do, make'. So, atta-kāra refers to 'one's own act'. In this type of compound the -kāra can mean 'maker' (literally 'one whose action is...'). So the term suttakāra can mean the one whose act was the creation of the suttas, a 'sutta-maker'. Another term, drawn from the Sāṅkhya school is ahaṃkāra'I maker'. Kicca-kāra is doing what ought to be done, doing one's duty.The adjectival form atta-kārin means 'doing one's own action'. The word para used as a pronoun means 'other' and contrasts with attan. If attakāra is one's own action, then parakāra is another's action.

The text begins with the meeting of the Buddha and an unnamed Brahmin who tells the Buddha his view, there's no nidāna beginning 'evaṃ me sutaṃ' or telling us where the encounter takes place, we just dive straight in. The whole Pāḷi text is cited below, with my translation and commentary interspersed.

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'.

Bodhi translates attakāra as 'self-initiative' which I think hints more at free will. I suppose we could say it means acting on one's own accord, or being free to act. Bodhi wants us to think about who is initiating the action. Vedantists say that no one initiates the action. Things just happen. There are hints here of Sāṅkhya darśaṇa. The Sāṅkhya view is that in reality what is most fundamental in us is a passive essence called puruṣa. The active side of experience (prakṛti) is like a distracting illusion that keeps puruṣa involved in the world of matter and away from quiescent perfection (kevala - literally isolation). In order to get back to perfection one has to role back the illusion until prakṛti returns to it's quiescent potential state. Sāṅkhya is very vague on some of the details of this view and many of the questions we'd like to ask don't seem to have answers on Sāṅkhya terms. But this view that there is no such thing as 'one's own action' shares some characteristics with Sāṅkhya. This is apparently news to the Buddha.

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'.

So the Buddha's first reaction to this previously unknown philosophy is to ask how anyone who had just walked up to him, greeted him, sat down on one side, and stated his philosophy (all apparently of his own free will) could possibly believe that he did not do so of his own accord. The commonsense response is that the view cannot make sense of what is happening right now. The Brahmin arrives by himself (sayaṃ abhikkamanto) and he leaves by himself (sayaṃ paṭikkamanto). So the determinist view is at best counter-intuitive.

The Buddha then asks a series of questions:

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.

Do you think, Brahmin, there is a factor of instigation?
Yes, Sir.
And when there is a factor of instigation, is it evident that beings are instigating?
Yes, Sir.
So, when there is a factor of instigation and it is evident that beings are instigating, this is the 'one's own action' of beings, this is another's action.

This question is obvious. It stems from what the Buddha said initially. If we see beings instigating actions (ārabbhavanto) then why would we assume that they are not doing their own actions? 'Instigation' is a translation of ārabbha from the verb ā√rabh'to begin'. Here dhātu is similar to the word dharma in many respects: 'a factor, an element'.

Taṃ kiṃ maññasi, brāhmaṇa, atthi nikkamadhātu…pe… atthi parakkamadhātu… atthi thāmadhātu… atthi ṭhitidhātu… atthi upakkamadhātū ti?
Evaṃ, bho.
Upakkamadhātuyā sati upakkamavanto sattā paññāyantī ti?
Evaṃ, bho.
Yaṃ kho, brāhmaṇa, upakkamadhātuyā sati upakkamavanto sattā paññāyanti, ayaṃ sattānaṃ attakāro ayaṃ parakāro.

Do you think, Brahmin, there is a factor of going out... a factor of advancing... a factor of resistance... a factor of endurance... a factor of approaching?
Yes, Sir.
And when these factors are present is it evident that beings are performing them?
Yes, Sir.
So, when there are these factors and it is evident that beings are performing them, this is the 'one's own action' of beings, this is 'another's action'.

Note the CST version of the text here seems to have been abbreviated more than the text that Bhikkhu Bodhi translates in his AN translation (p.902-904). I've followed the text I have, though I rather than using only the first and last members of the list, I've rendered the final question as a collective inquiry about all the actions involved.

The Buddha lists a series of generic actions which beings are seen to perform. And he asks the same question in each case. And, weirdly, the Brahmin answers "yes" in each case. And the Buddha simply points out the obvious: we all make choices all the time and act on intentions all the time. To argue against free will on some abstract principle is bizarre. Presumably the Brahmin thinks that even though we give the appearance of willed actions, that this is an illusion, a la Sāṅkhya or Advaita Vedanta. But the Buddha is far from impressed by this and repeats the phrase above:

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 comes and goes under his own steam possible say: there is no 'one's own action'; there is no 'another's action'.

Then the Brahmin, in a predictable change of heart, converts to being a follower of the Buddha:

Abhikkantaṃ, bho gotama…pe… ajjatagge pāṇupetaṃ saraṇaṃ gatan ti!

It is amazing, Mr Gotama... etc... from this day on [I've] gone for refuge for life.

Again Bhikkhu Bodhi seems to have an unabbreviated text. I translate the text as I have it. Bodhi says that the Brahmin becomes a lay follower. So a determinist is now convinced that we have free will (attakāra) simply be having the obvious situation pointed out to him. Not a very inspiring story - he doesn't even argue. But it shows that free will is a given in early Buddhism.

This word attakāra is in fact quite rare. It occurs in only one other sutta, Jātaka 528 (Mahābodhijātaka) and an Apadāna Story (i.24). The sutta is the Samaññaphala Sutta (DN 2) where this view on self-willed actions is associated with Makkhali Gosāla (DN i.53-55). Makkhali is a determinist, in that he doesn't believe any theory of causation or conditionality, nor does he see the point in religious exercises. He sums up his view as

Seyyathāpi nāma sutta-guḷe khitte nibbeṭhiyamānam eva paleti, evam eva bāle ca paṇḍite ca sandhāvitvā saṃsaritvā dukkhass'antaṃ karissantī ti.

Just as a ball of string that is thrown, will run away always unwinding, even so the fool and the wise running on, circling around, will eventually make an end of suffering.

So despite being a fatalist, he's also an optimist because he believes that events will play themselves out positively. The ball of string will eventually unravel and the end of dukkha will be reached. It's just that there is nothing we can do to speed the process up and no external power that can come to our rescue. What will be, will be, and it will take as long as it takes. One just has to accept that events will play themselves out for the best. To counteract this we simply point out that one can choose to believe that or not. It's up to the person, because we do in fact have choices.

These days many scientists are also determinists with no teleological bent: "there is no free will; what will be, will be; we have no idea what it will be, except that the entropy of the universe is increasing." Tackling this view is a more difficult problem that I'll try to address in my next essay.

~~oOo~~

Mycorrhizal fungus on roots

In Dan Everett's entertaining and thought-provoking book on his meeting with the Pirahã people of the Amazon (Don't Sleep There Are Snakes), one of the quirks of the culture he describes is the firm belief that no outsider can understand the Pirahã language. There is some objective justification for this, since in 300 years of contact with Europeans no outsider had ever managed to learn to speak Pirahã. Even the name Pirahã is Portuguese. As Everett began to gain proficiency in the language and to communicate with them in it, the view of the Pirahã people did not change. Despite conversing with him in their own language they continued to believe that he could not understand their conversations amongst themselves. This could be amusing, as they openly discussed what they thought of him as though he could not understand. At one point it was terrifying as the whole tribe got blind drunk and the men decided to kill him. The fact that they plotted at the tops of their voices allowed Everett time to hide their weapons and lock himself and his family in their house until everyone sobered up.

I bring this up because as I sat down to write about philosophy this image came back to me of people who believed themselves to be isolated by language, despite the evidence of their ears. The philosopher all too often proceeds as though theirs is the only mind in the world and they ought to be able to figure everything out from an isolated point of view. They do this despite communicating and even arguing over the details with other philosophers. Philosophers can be like the Pirahã.

A number of authors have made me rethink my own approach to philosophy, but in particular it was an article by Mercier & Sperber that made me rethink what philosophers do (See An Argumentative Theory of Reason). They make a case for reason having evolved to help groups make decisions, partly based on the fact that individual humans are in fact quite bad at reasoning since they frequently fall into cognitive bias or logical fallacy.

We have a real problem in thinking about ourselves. To me it seems as though we, especially in the English speaking world, have been infected by a thought virus that is distorting how we see the world. It begins, of course, with the Greeks, but closer to home a complex of thinkers gave fertile ground for this virus. Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill and the philosophy of Utilitarianism already see people as isolated. In Herbert Spencer's thought it translated into "survival of the fittest" as a law of nature. In society this translated into a libertarian ethic that justified exploitation of others for the purposes of accumulating wealth and power. Darwin was influenced by Spencer and took up the cry of "survival of the fittest". More modern influences are Ayn Rand (who advocated selfishness) and John Nash (the inventor of Game Theory, who believed all humans are completely self-interested). Richard Dawkins applied this ideology to biology and came up with the "selfish gene". To some extent we can see the obsession with the individual as an outgrowth from Romanticism, but combined with Utilitarianism it tends to dehumanise.

Feminist intellectuals have been made an important contribution in identifying power structures in society. Power and wealth have more or less always been concentrated in the hands of a small number of men - a structure called Patriarchy. However, Feminists generalise this concentration of power to all men, which is where I disagree with them. In identifying the elite we can begin to identify and critique the ideas put forward to (self) justify their hegemony. Higher education and access to public discourse was largely a preserve of the elite until quite recently. With open access to universities during the brief window of liberalism in the 1960s-1980s people who were not part of the elite were trained to think. The trend is towards increasing elitism once again, suggesting that our window of opportunity is closing. Part of the problem with pre-twentieth century philosophy is that philosophers and other intellectuals were usually members of the class which they defended. The modern elite co-opts middlemen to enact their power through granting tiny amounts of authority over workers or underlings. While we vote for our government, we are unlikely ever to vote for our boss or our priest!

We are presently living in a time of backlash against liberalisation from the elite; a time of increasing economic inequality that pays lip service to "rights" but in fact seeks to undermine the ability of anyone to challenge the power structure. Our civil rights are constantly being eroded by government for plausible reasons related to terrorism, though we seldom really consider the role of the government in making us the targets of terrorists in the first place. Had our respective governments not been involved in illegal wars and ham-fisted foreign policy of decades past, behaving like a playground bully, would we be in the position of sacrificing freedoms for security?

But really what started me down this road was thinking about how wrong the idea of survival of the fittest is when applied to individuals. Perhaps the most dangerous idea in history, because in the final analysis there is literally no such thing as an individual.

Mythologies

I've written quite often about metaphors and how they inform how we think. I've been critical about the underlying metaphors of the idea of what we call "spiritual" for example (see Spiritual I: The Life's Breath and Metaphors and Materialism). I've also written about the tree as the fundamental metaphor for evolution and have proposed the braided river system as a better, a far richer metaphor that could lead to more sophisticated thinking about evolution. A real set back for thinking about evolution was the application of Neoliberal ideology to evolution to produce the concept of the "selfish gene".

For a variety of reasons the solitary apex predator has fascinated humanity and over-whelmed other narratives that might be drawn from nature. The glamour of the predator is sublimated and becomes attached to the elite. Hogging resources and conspicuous consumption seem to be justified by equating members of the elite with apex predators. They are at the top of the food chain. Workers are equated with the herd animals that predators feed on. Of course it's not surprise that the same elite has made a sport out of hunting and killing predators, driving many of them close to extinction. And all this is entirely "natural". It's an ugly way of putting it and the spin doctors have of course found more appealing ways of justifying elites, while at the same time using nature documentaries to increase the glamour of predators.

Interestingly the recent trend in wildlife documentaries has been to show the sociality of apex predators, and the degradation of species on the verge of extinction due to human activity. Curiously the current round of BBC documentaries on sharks makes them not feared hunters and ruthless killers like the documentaries of the 20th century did. Now they are perfectly evolved, sleek, efficient and dynamic creatures which at the same time exhibit characteristics which evoke our empathy. Sharks who care for their young for example, or who are social. Metaphorically, or mythically in the sense it is used by Roland Barthes, this is saying that elite are only human, and no one can blame them for having out-evolved other fish in the sea. Indeed one ought to admire their the efficiency with which they go about sating their voracious appetites. So are documentary makers trying to justify the elites (who control what gets on TV) or do we share the goal of emphasising communality, symbiosis, and cooperation? Are they propping up the hegemony or undermining it? I'm not sure.

The fascination with apex predators is only one way to look at ecology. In my lifetime Lynn Margulis, with considerable resistance from men in her field, managed to establish and popularise the idea that the cells that make up plants and animals (eukaryotes) are in fact the result of a series of symbiotic mergers between varieties of bacteria. At least three species of bacteria were required to get us to where we are. Last to join the party were the mitochondria. These organelles were free living bacteria that developed the neat trick of being able to metabolise oxygen, which up to that point was a metabolic poison. By becoming permanently embedded in the ancestors of all eukaryote cells, mitochondria bequeathed the ability to metabolise oxygen to plants and animals. So each of our cells is actually a little community.

Tree/fungus network
Tree fungus internet. BBC
Tree-fungus networks. SciAm.

Another well know example of symbiosis is the commensal relationship of trees and mycorrhizal fungi. This symbiotic relationship is ubiquitous amongst trees. The fungi assist trees by breaking down the soil and making nutrients available, while the trees provide fungi food in the form of sugars. Neither can thrive without the other. Indeed the soil itself would not exist except for the action of fungi. The usual narratives of evolution, with survival of the fittest at their heart, cannot comprehend how important this relationship is. Symbiosis is a constant and vital feature of life on earth.

In the last few weeks we have seen that this relationship is more far reaching that we had imagined. Networks of fungi link trees and allow trees, including trees of different species, to share resources. A dying tree, for example, might send food to other trees via the fungal internet. The diagram on the right shows how two species of tree are connected in a small wood. Such fungi also enable a plant which is being grazed to warn it's neighbours, by sending chemical signals through fungal network, giving them the stimulus to produce more of the poisonous chemicals they use to deter grazing.

Symbiosis is a ubiquitous feature of life. In this view, evolutionary fitness is achieved through forming cooperative communities in which symbiosis is the most significant form of relationship. In these relationships the individual organism actually has blurred boundaries at best. In fact the individual tree is penetrated by fungi that also penetrate other trees and link them together and enable to them to share resources and communicate other information. Tree and fungi have individuals aspects and overlapping aspects. Remove one and the other cannot live, though each has it's own DNA and reproduces independently.

Animals all have a similar kind of symbiotic relationship with their gut flora. All of use carry around a couple of kilos of micro-organisms in our gut. We have long known that they assist us in breaking down our food. More recently it has become clear that the role these micro-organisms play is far greater. They not only break down food, but help to synthesise essential molecules, and are now implicated in the regulation of our immune system. (Compare: Commensal Bacteria at the Interface of Host Metabolism and the Immune System. Nature.) Indeed we could say that, like trees, animals are surrounded by a film of bacteria and fungi that are our interface with the physical world and that play an active role in our continued survival. We reproduce separately, but cannot live apart.

A fantastic example of symbiosis in progress occurs in cicadas. These insects have a symbiotic relationship with a bacteria called Hodgkinia, which live inside their cells (endosymbiosis). The long periods cicadas spend underground has had an extraordinary effect on the bacteria. Hodgkinia has evolved into two different species, both of which continue to reside inside the cells of cicadas. But what's more, the different species have suffered degradation of their genome through accumulated mutations and the isolation of life inside a host cell. Collectively the different species of bacteria still perform the same functions in the symbiotic relationship, but individually we see only a minimal functioning genome. Incidentally since all bacteria can successfully exchange nuclear material, they are technically one species with many varieties. Cicadas have other bacterial endosymbionts that are not similarly affected.

So it seems that all plants and all animals are involved in symbiotic relationships with members of other kingdoms, particularly bacteria and fungi. Symbiosis is not a rare and unusual feature of some organisms that can be treated as a special case of evolution. Symbiosis is the key to understanding life as we know it. And our definitions of individuals skew the reality of what an organism is.

The ubiquity of symbiosis and other forms of cooperation amongst living things could easily have informed the metaphors and myths of nature that we use to understand and guide our lives. Had the founders of modern evolution not been Imperialists and libertarians looking for justification of their way of life, then we might have understood our place in the universe rather differently. Had Christianity been imbued with a sense of the web of life, rather than the Great Chain of Being, then we might have better appreciated our role in the whole. Sadly, we have the view that we do. So new science struggles to make headway. Results that ought to seem normal, to confirm our general hypothesis of how the world works, currently seem like outliers and exceptions. It may be many generations before enough examples build up to change the paradigm. I won't see the change in my lifetime, but there is reason to believe that such a change will come.

Individuals

It is sometimes argued, following the Whorf-Spair hypothesis, that we see the world as being made up of individuals acting as agents because of the noun/verb structure of our language. I think opinion in the linguistic community has swung away from this view, not least because Whorf was at times inaccurate in his descriptions of the North American languages on which he based his other ideas. We know of course that the subject/object distinction can break down in meditation. Those who experience this speak very highly of it and say that it is what we all ought to be aiming for. Unfortunately the ability (be it talent or dedication) to achieve these kinds of breakthroughs is rare. Most of us are trapped in a world of subjects and objects and have to make the best of it.

When we look closely we see that what appears to be an individual human, is in fact a community with many levels. Each cell is a community of endosymbionts, bound together for billions of years. But other types of newer endosymbionts also occur, with bacteria living inside cells, but as bacteria rather than as organelles. In our bodies dozens of different types of cells, totalling many trillions of cells, form an interlocking community. They work together to maintain optimal conditions for life. Another view of this is that our bodies maintain optimal conditions for taking in low entropy energy and excreting high entropy energy and everything else is incidental. In any case, surrounding this community is a halo of loosely bound symbionts that are intimately involved with our extracting nutrients from the outside world and protecting us from pathogens.

In the case of animals we always need at least two, one male and one female, for reproduction (though of course some animals are hermaphrodites, and parthenogenesis does occur on rare occasions). Each organism has a use-by date, after which it ceases to be viable. Before that time it endeavours to create offspring that, by a combination of genetic and epigenetic inheritance, will be at least as well adapted to its environment as its parents, if not better. But if this strategy is to work then a large population is required to allow sexual recombination of genes to prevent a genetic bottleneck. Inbreeding causes mutations to build up too quickly and can be fatal to a species. Thus the smallest viable unit of humanity is not the individual, the couple, or even the extended family, but the tribe made up from a number of clans which in turn contain several extended families.

Other kinds of relationships are also essential. For example, in a city where no one grows food, everyone is reliant on distant producers they will almost certainly never meet to supply them with food. Water comes through miles of pipes and sewerage leaves through more miles of pipes. We exist in a web of relationships that sustains us.

The question then becomes, why are we so focussed on individuals? The answers are complex and would take too much time to articulate in full. One answer is that there is a distinct advantage to some individuals when we all think of ourselves as individuals. For most of us there is safety in numbers and individualism means we are less able to defend ourselves (and our wealth). This can be and is exploited by rogue individuals (the elite) who operate not like apex predators, in fact, but like parasites: they benefit at our cost, but both go on living. Through the socially liberal times when wealth sharing was the fashion this was less obvious. But since Neoliberalism took hold at government level, inequality has been rising again. In the last 30 years 90% of people have seen their wealth eroded, while the top 10% have seen substantial increases. All the gains in wealth have been at the top. What we have instead of wealth is more sophisticated entertainment! Or once expensive goods produced under slave-like labour conditions in third world countries that make us feel rich. It's the old trick of bread and circuses again.

There are good arguments for seeing ourselves primarily as members of a community rather than as individual free agents. At the very least we need to be be far more highly attuned to how we relate to those around us, how we rely on each other to survive. People we rely on for food and water, shelter, for example ought to be important to us. Their well being is our well being in a very real sense. We ought, for example, to see taxes, not as the amount the government takes from us, but as our contribution to the general welfare. It's how we look after teachers, nurses, firemen, police and military who carry out tasks that benefit everyone. If we do not look after them, then our own welfare is put at risk. Unfortunately the elite are wealthy enough to avoid paying small amounts of tax and compensate by spending large amounts on educating their kids, private health care and so on. It's cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.

Unfortunately the basic myths and metaphors of our modern society tend to blind us to important aspects of nature like symbiosis and highlight incidental aspects that benefit only the few. The reason for this is that for some centuries the myths of the people have been controlled by elites. Before industrialisation folk had their own stories, their own music, their own ways. Each community had their own versions of these, though as Michael Witzel has discovered we also share some myths across most of humanity. Now we all draw from a central well that is controlled by elites. The internet does offer a kind of ersatz alternative: margarine to the butter of a healthy human community. It looks and spreads like butter, but it is what it is: yellow grease.

The underlying myths and metaphors are what make the stories we tell sound plausible. Those of us who want change need to be aware of our own myths and metaphors. We can challenge old, poisonous views like "survival of the fittest" applied to human affairs. We can recast the story. We know that we cannot simply force collectivity onto people. That doesn't work. We also know that certain aspects of collectivity have a downside. Innovation and creativity require eccentrics pursuing their own goals and leaders drawing people along with them. But there must be a happy medium in which we honour our symbiotic, communal nature of life without sacrificing individuality completely. The odds are against us because the media used to communicate ideas and values to the masses are controlled by the elites, mostly run by people who are comfortable wielding their little modicum of authority, and tasked with distracting us from the serious business of life. But if we don't keep trying to shift the ground by choosing different myths, then we abandon humanity to a dystopian future.

Buddhist Interdependence

It's often assumed that systems thinking (which is a broad label for the kinds of ideas I'm writing about here) is "just like" the Buddhist idea of interdependence. I can see why systems thinking is attractive to Buddhists, but it has hardly anything in common with traditional Buddhist thinking, despite what some modern writers would have us believe. To begin with these is no sign of any interest in interdependence in the early Buddhist texts. Dependent arising is largely focussed on mental states and these are not interconnected, but arise in a strict series, and the conditions of which are precisely stated (either sense object, sense faculty, and sense cognition; or the nidānas or upanisās). It is only once Buddhists begin to apply Dependent Arising as a Theory of Every that we see interdependence emerge as a subject. And even then it appears to draw on Vedic religious ideas as much as Buddhism. Interconnectivity is a feature of the Vedic worldview which bases religious power on the ability to identify and manipulate correspondences between things in this world and things in heaven.

Even so the chief sources of interdependence, such as the Gandhavyūha Sūtra, point to interdependence being a metaphor for śūnyatā. The idea being that all dharmas have the same important characteristics of lacking svabhāva (meaning precisely that a dharma cannot be a condition for its own existence). Thus if one can understand even one dharma, then one can understand them all. Or at least, one can understand of them all, that aspect which has soteriological value. Of course that soteriological value is often confused with an ontology, but it need not be. The image typically used for this way of seeing dharmas is Indra's Net: a net covered in jewels with the special property that each reflects all of the others. Far from pointing to some mystical dimension of reality, it is illustrating śūnyatā in metaphors and symbols rather than concepts. Despite the fact that Buddhists saw pratītyasamutpāda as a Theory of Everything, this more basic idea continued to exist alongside it. Perhaps because meditators seem to revalorise the importance of examining experience and undermine any grandiose philosophising that has been going on, from time to time.

For most Buddhist intellectuals, for most of Buddhist history, "nature" has been seen as part of saṃsāra. And when Buddhists have imagined paradise, they have imagined it in decidedly unnatural ways: as perfectly flat, covered in precious stones, populated by beings who don't have sex and are born by apparition in gigantic lotus flowers, and so on. If Buddhists were nature lovers, there is little sign of it. It is true that some monastic rules seem to suggest that monks were proto-environmentalists, in fact the principle was that they not be a burden on the people who supported them.

This has not stopped modern Buddhists from adopting the principles of ecology and environmentalism and claiming kinship between the two worldviews. I think this kinship is far from obvious. That said embracing environmentalism is a sane response to the damage that industrialisation and globalisation has caused and are causing in the world. When the climate of the whole planet is being nudged in a direction that is inimical to human life, any narrative that motivates people to take mitigating actions is better than none. On the other hand this can back-fire as has happened with the story of climate change. Too much of the climate change story has been built on unsound foundations, which has given wriggle room to those who wish to avoid thinking about it. And now it is probably too late to prevent catastropic change, at least James "Gaia" Lovelock thinks so.

On a cautionary note, I think the idea that this translates into "saving the planet" is hubris. The planet, life, will be fine no matter what humans do. It has survived for 3.5 billion years and suffered much worse than our manipulations (e.g. global ice-ages, comet strikes, planetary scale volcanism, mass extinctions). We tend to think of ourselves as the most advanced form of life, but in fact all forms of life presently around are equally evolved. Bacteria are the dominant form of life, with fungi a close second. And this will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. Everywhere people have been, excepting space, bacteria beat us to it. From Antarctica to the hottest hot springs; from the upper atmosphere to the deepest depths of the ocean,; in the purest streams to toxic waste dumps; bacteria find a way to live and often share that ability with other species.

At the moment we have the basic metaphors and myths about nature, the environment, and our place in it wrong. What we have all seems to be based in Neoliberal ideology, or to have been developed along it and share the basic values of Neoliberalism. It's not in harmony with how nature actually is. And this means that we are not in harmony with nature, or with each other. We see ourselves all wrong. We only exist inside a series of nested and over-lapping communities. At the moment we are afflicted by parasites that are sucking our blood. If we see to the health of the communities we live in, then the parasites will most likely be dealt with quite incidentally. At least this is what nature is telling us.

In the Triratna Buddhist Order we have this image of the Order as being like the thousand-armed form of Avalokiteśvara and each one of us being like a hand, playing our part in the compassionate activity of the bodhisatva. My implement is a symbolic pen. I like to think of Gaia having a near infinite number of limbs, and every organism playing a part in a harmonious and efficient organism, gloriously surfing the entropy wave together.

~~oOo~~

Further Reading

Lovelock, James. (2000) Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford University Press.

Margulis Lynn. (1998) Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution. Basic Books.

This blog post is an old one I've held in reserve for a week when I can't make the Friday morning deadline The Pali counterpart to this text, the Upanisā Sutta (SN 12.23), is a very important text for the Triratna Buddhist Order. Sangharakshita, following pointers provided by Mrs Rhys Davids, found this sutta and from as early as the 1950s made it a core text for his teaching. The main idea he called the Spiral Path. An account of the doctrine of the Spiral Path was included in the first edition of his A Survey of Buddhism in 1954. Later other teachers, such as Bhikkhu Bodhi and Ayya Khemma also took an interest in this text, though the true significance of the Spiral Path is seldom seen outside of the Triratna Movement.

The Chinese counterpart, translated into English by myself for the first time (back in 2012), is very similar in many ways to the Upanisā Sutta. It shows an element of standardisation with the other Spiral Path texts which are compiled in the 5th section of the Chinese Madhyāgama (MĀ) translation. The MĀ is different from it's Pāḷi counterpart in that it collects many Spiral Path texts together that are scattered about the Nikāyas. I've prepared draft translations of all of these texts (MĀ 42-55) though these have now been superseded by the Numata Foundation translation of the Madhyāgama under the editorship of Bhikkhu Anālayo. However, though the first volume has been published, it is very expensive and thus unlikely to be accessible to ordinary Buddhists. Hence my translations remain useful for now. At some point it would be useful to produce a comparative study of the Pāli and Chinese versions of the Spiral Path texts.

A reminder that I have already completed a comprehensive survey of the Pāḷi Spiral Path texts which was published in the Western Buddhist Review.

Nirvāṇa Sūtra.

Madhyāgama 55 [1] Corresponding Preconditions Section. Taisho Vol. 1 no.26.

Chinese Translation by Gautama Saṅghadeva between 397-398 CE. [2]
English Translation by Jayarava Aug 2012

English Translation

Thus have I heard, one time the Buddha was staying in Śravāsti ( 舍衛國 shěwèiguó ), at the Jeta Grove 勝林 of Anāthapiṇḍika’s park 孤獨園. Then the Bhagavan addressed the monks: "nirvāṇa (涅槃 nièpán) has a precondition (習xí [3] Skt. upaniṣad) and does not lack a precondition. The precondition for nirvāṇa is liberation (解脫 jiětuō Skt. vimokṣa).

Liberation also has a precondition and does not lack a precondition. What is the precondition of liberation? Cessation of desire (無欲; Skt. virāga) is the precondition of liberation.

Cessation of desire also has a precondition and does not lack a precondition. What is the precondition of cessation of desire? Disillusionment (厭 yàn; Skt. nirveda) is the precondition.

Disillusionment also has a precondition and does not lack a precondition. What is the precondition of disillusionment? To see reality and know things as they are (見如實知如真. jiànrúshí zhīrúzhēn; Skt yathābhūta-jñānadarśana [4] ) is the precondition.

To see reality and know things as they are has a precondition and does not lack a precondition. What is the precondition of seeing reality, and knowing things as they are? Samādhi (定 dìng) is the precondition.

Samādhi also has a precondition and does not lack a precondition. What is the precondition of samādhi? Bliss (樂 lè; Skt. sukha) is the precondition.

Bliss also has a precondition and does not lack a precondition. What is the precondition of bliss?

Calming down (止 zhǐ; Skt. praśrabdha) is the precondition.

Calming down also has a precondition and does not lack a precondition. What is the precondition of calming down? Rapture (喜 xǐ ; Skt. pīti) is the precondition.

Rapture also has a precondition and does not lack a precondition. What is the precondition of calming down? Joy (歡悅 huānyuè; Skt. prāmodya) is the precondition.

Joy also has a precondition and does not lack a precondition. What is the precondition of joy?

Non-regret (不悔 bù huǐ; Skt. avipratisāra) is the precondition.

Non-regret also has a precondition and does not lack a precondition. What is the precondition of non-regret? Morality (護戒 Hù jiè; Skt. śila) is the precondition.

Morality also has a precondition and does not lack a precondition. What is the precondition of morality? Guarding the sense faculties (護諸根 Hù zhūgēn; Skt. guptaindriya? [5] ) is the precondition.

Guarding the sense faculties also has a precondition and does not lack a precondition. What is the precondition? Right mindfulness (正念 zhèng niàn Skt. samyak-smṛti), attentiveness (正智 zhèngzhì; Skt. saṃprajāna) [i.e. the eightfold path] is the precondition.

Mindfulness and attentiveness also has a precondition and does not lack a precondition. What is the precondition? Wise attention (正思惟 zhèng sīwéi; Skt. yoniśo manasikāra) [6] is the precondition.

Wise attention also has a precondition and does not lack a precondition. What is the precondition?

Faith (信 xìn; Skt. śraddhā) is the precondition.

Faith also has a precondition and does not lack a precondition. What is the precondition? Suffering (苦 kǔ; Skt. duḥkha) is the precondition.

Suffering also has a precondition and does not lack a precondition. What is the precondition of duḥkha? Old age and Death (老死 lǎosǐ; Skt. jarāmaraṇa) are the precondition.

Old age and death also have a precondition and do not lack a precondition. What is the precondition of old age and death? (生 shēng; Skt. jāti) is the precondition.

Birth also has a precondition and does not lack a precondition. What is the precondition of birth?

Becoming (有 yǒu; Skt. bhava) is the precondition.

Becoming also has a precondition and does not lack a precondition. What is the precondition of birth?

Sensation (受 shòu; Skt. vedanā) is the precondition.

Sensation also has a precondition and does not lack a precondition. What is the precondition of sensation? [7] Desire (愛 ài; Skt. kānti; cf. 貪欲 tānyù; Skt. tṛṣṇā) is the precondition.

Desire also has a precondition and does not lack a precondition. What is the precondition of desire?

Contact (覺 jué; Skt. sprśati) is the precondition.

Contact also has a precondition and does not lack a precondition. What is the precondition of Contact?

Contact food [8] (更樂 gènglè; Skt. sparśo āhāra) is the precondition.

Contact food also has a precondition and does not lack a precondition. What is the precondition of contact food. The six sense faculties (六處 liù chù; Skt. sadāyatana) are the precondition.

The six sense faculties also have a precondition and do not lack a precondition. What is the precondition of six sense faculties? Name & form (名色 míng sè; Skt nāmarūpa) are the precondition.

Name & form also have a precondition and do not lack a precondition. What is the precondition of name & form? Awareness (識 shi; Skt. vijñāna) is the precondition.

Awareness also has a precondition and does not lack a precondition. What is the precondition of awareness? Constructs (行 xíng; Skt. saṃskāra) are the precondition.

Constructs also have a precondition and do not lack a precondition. What is the precondition of

constructs? Ignorance (無明 wúmíng; Skt. avidyā) is the precondition.

Ignorance is the cause (緣 yuán; Skt. pratyaya) of constructs; constructs cause awareness; awareness causes name & form; name & form causes the six sense faculties; the six sense faculties cause contact food; contact food causes contact; contact causes desire; desire causes sensation; sensation causes becoming; becoming causes birth; birth causes old age and death; old age and death cause suffering;

With suffering as a precondition there will be faith. With faith as a precondition, there will be wise attention. With wise attention as a precondition, there will be mindfulness & attentiveness. With mindfulness & attentiveness as a precondition there will be guarding the senses; morality; non-regret; joy; rapture; calming down; bliss; integration (samādhi); knowing and seeing things as they are; disgust; cessation of desire; liberation. With liberation as cause there will be nirvāna.

This is what the Buddha said. The bhikkhus heard and they all rejoiced.

[1] T01n0026_p0490c01(00)- T01n0026_p0491a13(00). "*Nirvāṇa Sūtra, the 55th sutra of T.99 中阿含經 *Madhyāgamasūtra" Note from my friend Maitiu O'Ceileachair , henceforth [MO’C]

[2] This sūtra is the counterpart of the Pāli Upanisā Sutta (S 12.23). "Most of the other Sutras in this section deal with the same topic but they don't all give the the same chain. Sutras 42, 43, 47, and 50 give the chain from observing the precepts to nirvāṇa. Sutras 45 and 46 give a similar chain that starts with hrī and apatrāpya. Sutra 44 gives a chain starting with *saṃyagjñāna, saṃyaksaṃkalpa. Most of them are very short and give little more than lists of the links in the chain. Sutra 55 is probably the most detailed." [MO’C]

[3] 習 xí "usually means ‘to practice or become accustomed to’ and the only place I've seen it used to mean ‘cause or condition’ is in this sutra and the other sutras in this section of T.99." [MO’C] Here is stands for upaniṣad (Pāli upanisā) in the sense of underlying condition, or precondition. Bodhi uses the phrase ‘proximate condition’ in his translation of the Upanisā Sutta.

[4] Cf. 見 ‘see; darśana’; 如實 ‘reality, truth’, yathābhūta;知 jñāna; 如真 yathābhūta, tathatā; hence "to see reality, and know things as they are".

[5] 諸根 zhūgēn = indriya; 護 = ‘protect, guard’ and used to translate Skt. gupta as well as rakṣita, pāla and pālita. Perhaps Skt. indriyagupta? Cf. 守護根門 Shǒu hùgēn mén ‘guarding the sense gates’.

[6] This combination of characters is also used for samyak-samkalpa right-intention.

[7] Note that sensation and desire are given in reverse order in the Chinese text. This would seem to be a scribal error.

[8] I can’t find 更樂 per se, but Digital Dictionary of Buddhism has "更樂食 (simplified 更乐食) [gēnglè shí] ‘sensory food’". In Yogācārabhūmi-śāstra (Translated Chapters) By Maitreya Bodhisattva. Buddha Education Foundation, 2012. http://buddhavacana.net/yogacarabhumi-sastra/ "Sensory food 觸食／樂食: the nourishment that one takes through the contacts of the six senses". (p.47) The collective term for the four kinds of food is catvāra āhārāḥ. In the Yogacarabhumi [manobhūmidvitīyā] itself we find "| te punaścatvāra āhārāḥ | kavaḍaṅkāra āhāraḥ sparśo manaḥsañcetanā vijñānañ ca | http://dsbc.uwest.edu/manobhūmidvitīyā. The idea of contact as food occurs in the Pāli (See Nyanaponika 1981. ‘The Four Nutriments of Life: An Anthology of Buddhist Texts.’ Wheel Publication. No. 105/106 Buddhist Publication Society). But it is used very differently. In Pāli contact is nourishment; here contact-nourishment is a precondition for contact.

~~oOo~~

Many modern Buddhists find themselves struggling with the doctrines of Buddhism that rely on metaphysical speculation even though Buddhists regularly warn each other against speculating about metaphysics. The doctrine of rebirth is the one that usually heads the list. Literal rebirth seems very implausible in the light of other fields of knowledge. The doctrine of karma is allied to rebirth in the sense that if one is reborn it is because of karma. One of the main applications of pratītyasamutpāda has been to try to explain karma and historically this effort led to changes in the ways that Buddhists understood pratītyasamutpāda.

In my examination of the history of the idea of karma, in many blog essays and one published article (2014), I have noted that Buddhists themselves were often in dispute over the details of how karma could work. The idea of pratītyasamutpāda underwent significant change to try to accommodate karma. My 2014 article explained how the doctrine of karma itself undergoes a fundamental shift in the Mahāyāna that effectively decouples actions from consequences. The issue of whether there is or is not an interval between death and rebirth depends on how one interprets the karma doctrine to begin with. Despite an almost universal attempt by authors who write about Buddhism to present smoothed over accounts of these doctrines, what we find in the texts is a long history of dispute and alteration in search of coherence.

By now we know that no two Buddhist sects applied pratītyasamutpāda to the karma doctrine in the quite the same way. This knowledge may take some pressure off modern Buddhists who struggle to integrate Iron Age and medieval Buddhist ideas into their worldview. Even most Iron Age and medieval Buddhists could not quite believe it!

Although the archaeology of the karma is not complete, many of the main features have been exposed. Some details remain to be picked out. In this essay I will present a translation of a partial sutta from the Aṅguttara Nikāya. It lacks a nidāna, a framing story, and a proper ending. It's the middle of a text without a beginning or end. None-the-less it is interesting because the view of karma it presents is not in tune with the orthodox Theravāda doctrine, or with the other presentations of karma in the Nikāyas.

There is a counterpart sutra in the Chinese translation of the Madhyāgama (Taishō 26, no. 15; translated in Bingenheimer 2013). It is a more complete text, with a proper sutra opening and all that. I'll begin with my translation from the Pāḷi and then make a few comments. Where the Pali is tricky or unusual, I'll compare with the Chinese to see if it sheds any light.

Karajakāyasuttaṃ (AN 10.219; v.299-301)

“I do not say that intentional actions done (kata) and accumulated (upacita) are eliminated without having first experienced [the fruits], either arising in this life, or in the next, or some other. Nor however do I say that one makes an end to suffering without having first experienced the fruits of intentional actions done and accumulated.”

[The Chinese text inserts a discourse on the dasakusalakammapatha here and it is precisely the one who cultivates this path who is able to radiate mettā etc]

“Monks, this noble disciple, being without craving or aversion, unconfused, attentive, fully mindful (paṭisata), dwells suffusing one direction with feelings of loving kindness, with feelings of compassion, with feelings of sympathetic joy, and with feelings of equanimity. Similarly with the second, third, and fourth directions. Thus, they dwell suffusing above, below, across, and in all directions, everywhere, the entire world with feelings of love, compassion, joy, and equanimity that are extensive, lofty, immeasurable, without hatred or illwill.”

“[The noble disciple] knows ‘formerly my mind (citta) was limited and undeveloped, but now my mind is unlimited and well developed. No measurable kamma dwells or lingers there now.’”

“What do you think, monks, if a youth were to cultivate the liberation of the mind which is love from an early age, would they do an evil action?”

“Indeed not, Sir.”

“Not doing an evil action would they be touched by suffering?”

“Indeed not, Sir. Not doing an evil action, how could they be touched by suffering?”

“In that case a man or woman should cultivate liberation of the mind through love. Monks, a man or a woman cannot take this body when they go. This internal mind is mortal, monks.”

“They understand, ‘All that evil done through this action-born body in some past time is to be experienced here. It will not follow.”

“Developed in this way, monks, liberation of the mind through love for a knowledgeable monk results in being a non-returner (anāgāmin) here, if they do not attain a higher liberation.”

~o~

I've noted the lack of framing story. We do not even get a city where it was preached. By contrast in the Madhyāgama version (MĀ 15) the passage is joined with a discourse on the dasakusalakammapatha or ten courses of right action. This might explain why the Karajakāya Sutta is in the chapter of tens (dasa aṅguttara). But if this is true, then we must also conclude it was classified with the tens before losing the parts concerned with the dasakusalakammapatha. In turn this is evidence that the Pāli Canon is not a complete and faithful record of Buddhist teachings as it is sometimes portrayed. Bits of the Aṅguttara Nikāya are missing!

I've compressed the sutta by combining the four brahmavihāras together. The CST edition has mettā and upekkhā spelt out in full, with abbreviated passages for kāruṇa and muditā. The gist of the story is that by dwelling in the fully developed brahmavihāras a practitioner may become a once returner. That one who practises the brahmavihāras will not be touched by disappointment (dukkha). And that karma all ripens in this life, it does not follow on. It is this last part which is the most interesting.

Before we compare this karma theory, a few remarks about the other aspects of the text. It is well known that mettā and the other brahmavihāras have been down played in the modern Theravāda. Richard Gombrich has made the case, based on his reading of the Tevijjā Sutta that brahmavihāra literally 'staying with Brahman' was originally a synonym for nirvāṇa (see Gombrich 2009: 80-84). This text seems to be somewhere in the middle on the issue of the value of practising the brahmavihāras, saying that at the very least one will become a non-returner (anāgāmin) The non-returner is a strange creature. They are not yet liberated from birth and death, but they are not required to be reborn in one of the five realms. After death, they exist in a definite sense, unlike a tathāgata about whom nothing may be said. As we saw earlier in the year, the anāgāmin is at the centre of the dispute over the antarābhava.

The other point is a moral one. If we take this text literally then it is saying that by radiating the brahmavihāras out to the four directions no dukkha will ever arise. In talking about this issue of dukkha in the Karajakāya with my Pāḷi reading group, I mentioned that following Sue Hamilton I take dukkha to refer to all unenlightened experience. I suggested that the focus on unpleasant experience was somewhat misleading, because from this point of view pleasant experience is also dukkha. The problem is in the translation of dukkha as 'suffering'. I have long argued for 'disappointment' as a serviceable translation. Our experience is dukkha because it does not conform to our expectation. Our expectation is that we will not suffer any undeserved pain or misery; and that we will experience all the pleasure and happiness we do deserve (based on what we believe we deserve of course). And that this is what constitutes a good life. So my reading is that the text is not saying that one radiating mettā etc. will never experience pain or suffering, but that they will never suffer disappointment, that whatever happens to them will be in line with their expectations. One cannot realistically be born a human being and expect not to suffer. The Pāli texts record a number of occasions when even the Buddha suffered physical pain (particularly the story of the stone sliver, Sakalika Sutta. SN 1.3).

Elsewhere, some early texts say that only dukkha arises and only dukkha ceases (See The Simile of the Chariot, 2009). Thus there is a conflict between those texts and this. If everything that arises is only dukkha, the idea that a person will not experience dukkha by radiating the brahmavihāras is a contradiction. The two ideas are mutually exclusive.

Now we return to the karma theory presented in the Karajakāya. The opening passage of the Karajakāya is a classic Pāli text account of the inescapability of karma. It insists that all the fruits of all the actions must be experienced, and all of them must be experienced before there is an end to suffering. This sentiment is repeated throughout the Nikāyas and is taken up by Buddhaghosa as Theravāda orthodoxy. Later Buddhists deprecate this original requirement of karma (see Attwood 2014).

Now part of the reason I wanted to translate this text and write about it stems from Bhikkhu Bodhi's translation in his Numerical Discourses (2012). The Pāli passage in question follows on from the revelation that one who suffuses the directions with love etc, will not experience dukkha. Next the Pāli reads:

"Bhāvetabbā kho panāyaṃ, bhikkhave, mettācetovimutti itthiyā vā purisena vā. Itthiyā vā, bhikkhave, purisassa vā nāyaṃ kāyo ādāya gamanīyo. Cittantaro ayaṃ, bhikkhave, macco."

"So evaṃ pajānāti – ‘yaṃ kho me idaṃ kiñci pubbe iminā karajakāyena pāpakammaṃ kataṃ, sabbaṃ taṃ idha vedanīyaṃ; na taṃ anugaṃ bhavissatī’ti."

Compared to my translation above, Bodhi renders this:

"A woman or man should develop this liberation of mind by loving kindness. A woman or man cannot take this body with them when they go. Mortals have mind as their core."

"[The noble disciple] understands: 'whatever bad deed I did here in the past with this deed-born body is all to be experienced here. It will not follow along." (p.1542; emphasis added)

The first part of this is fine, but when I read "Mortals have mind as their core." (translating cittantaro ayaṃ macco) my eyebrows shot up. What on earth could this mean?

Cittantaro ayaṃ macco

"Cittantaro ayaṃ macco." is a common sentence structure in Pali and typically taken to read "this X is Y" though the word order is flexible. So it could be as Bodhi reads it "this mortal has an interior [which is] mind" or it might be read along the lines of "this internal mind is mortal". The compound cittantaro is a little unexpected. Antara is cognate with our word "interior", and of course the inside of something might be considered its 'core'. However, do mortals have a "core"? The usual idea in Buddhist metaphysics is to deny that anyone has a core, especially a mental core. Macco means 'one subject to death, a mortal', but note that it is in the singular, 'a mortal' (Cf Skt martya'having death, dying, subject to death'; there is no connection to the English 'martyr'), rather than Bodhi's plural "mortals" but the statement does seem to be a generalisation.

The compound cittantaro only occurs in this text. In this case Bodhi appears to be reading the compound as a bahuvrīhi 'has an inside which is citta'. As I have said this raises metaphysical objections. How else might we read the compound? If we look at other similar compounds we find

Buddh'antara - the time between the death of one Buddha and the appearance of another
eḷakam-antara - on the threshold or across a threshold (eḷaka),
daṇḍam-antara - amongst the firewood or across a stick (daṇḍa).

This suggests that Bodhi has misunderstood this compound. Margaret Cone is non-commital in her dictionary. In relation to this passage she ventures "having the interval of a thought-moment;" with a question mark to indicate she is unsure (DOP sv citta). That Cone is unsure is reassuring to me as I struggle to make sense of this passage. If she is unsure then I am not embarrassed about my confusion. Cone has picked up what similar compounds imply, i.e. that antara might mean in the 'space' between two moments in time. So that we would read the sentence as "a mortal has the interval of a thought moment". But again we have to ask, "What does this mean?" It has the advantage of not obviously violating Buddhist doctrine, but can we take it literally? A mortal typically lives many years and a thought moment is as long as the snap of one's fingers. The words make sense, but the sentence does not.

Turning to Buddhaghosa, on this passage he says:

Cittantaroti cittakāraṇo, atha vā citteneva antariko. Ekasseva hi cuticittassa anantarā dutiye paṭisandhicitte devo nāma hoti, nerayiko nāma hoti, tiracchānagato nāma hoti. Purimanayepi cittena kāraṇabhūtena devo nerayiko vā hotīti attho.

Bodhi translates most of this passage in note 2189 (p.1859), I finish it in square brackets:

“They have mind as their cause, or their interior is due to mind. For with the mind at rebirth that follows without interval the mind at death, one becomes a deva, a hell-being, or an animal.” [It means they were formerly a deva or hell-being though the cause or condition of mind (citta) also.]

So Bodhi has translated in line with Buddhaghosa, as he usually does in these cases where the text is obscure. However, I once more have to quibble with how Bodhi is translating here. Cittakāraṇo must mean 'having a cause which is citta', though this is no help because the meaning of the sentence is still not clear. Antara and kāraṇa are by no means synonyms, so Buddhaghosa's logic is opaque. To say that a mortal has citta as their cause is possibly true from a Buddhist point of view, but it doesn't really make sense of the sutta. Again the words make sense, but the sentence does not. Bodhi then reads antariko as 'interior', which is allowed but also doubtful. What does it means to say that our interior is due to mind. As opposed to our exterior?

A lot depends on how we parse atha vā citteneva antariko. We can read citteneva as citte na eva or cittena eva (Bodhi adopts the latter). The former would mean that the whole sentence says something like "there is no interval for a thought event". I like this reading because it is followed by an insistence that the relinking mental event (paṭisandhicitta) follows immediately from the death mental event (cuticitta) with no interval. This is standard Theravāda metaphysics which requires that there never be an interruption of the stream of cittas. This makes sense, but is this really what the sutta is saying? I'm not sure.

My friend and Pāḷi guru, Dhīvan, has come up with an intriguing way to read the passage. Although the dictionaries all take macco as a lexicalised gerund of marati (i.e. as Skt martya from √mṛ 'to die'), he suggests that macco might represent a future passive participle (Skt martavyaḥ), and work in apposition to gamanīyo which is also a fpp. Then cittantaro and kāyo are in apposition also. Thus we could read the sutta as saying

nāyaṃ kāyo ādāya gamanīyo, cittantaro ayaṃ, bhikkhave, macco

there is no going taking the body [with you], there is dying with the mind as interval.

Dhīvan wants to take cittantaro as related to the measurelessness of the mind in the brahmavihāra state. One whose citta is limited (paritta) will be reborn, but one whose citta is immeasurable (appamāṇa) is not reborn, but becomes an anāgāmin (at least). As I say, this is intriguing, but it's something of a stretch.

So, from the Pāli sources we have several alternative readings, none of them entirely satisfying. The Chinese text of MĀ 15 is somewhat different here (T 1.438.a19-20) :

若彼男女在家、出家，修慈心解脫者，不持此身往至彼世，但隨心去此。

When those male or female 男女 laypeople 在家 or renunciates 出家 repeatedly practice (修...者) the loving-kindness mind-liberation 慈心解脫, [they] do not carry 持 this body 身 towards 往至 the other world 彼世, [but] go there 去此 according to 但隨 the citta心.

Cf "Bhāvetabbā kho panāyaṃ, bhikkhave, mettācetovimutti itthiyā vā purisena vā. Itthiyā vā, bhikkhave, purisassa vā nāyaṃ kāyo ādāya gamanīyo. Cittantaro ayaṃ, bhikkhave, macco."

The first part of this passage is similar. It applies to men and women for example, itthiyā vā purisena vā = 男女 ; they cultivate mettācetovimutti = 慈心解脫. When they go to the other world they do not take their body nāyaṃ kāyo ādāya = 不持此身往至彼世. However, just where we wish the Chinese might shed some light on our text it is very different! Where the Pāḷi is weird, the Chinese is conventional, one goes to the next world according to one's citta (但隨心去此). Is this because the translator has smoothed out the text? Or is it because the Gāndhārī text was already different. And if the Gāndhārī text was different, why was it? Was one or other text corrupted? Or was it edited by sectarian interests?

Of course Bodhi was obliged to settle on a translation, and he had 1500 pages of text to translate. But to my mind "Mortals have mind as their core" is unfortunate. It's not at all clear that this is what the text says, or even how Buddhaghosa understood the text. It's a very strange thing to find a Pāli text saying. On the other hand I don't see a way to resolve the quandary.

Idha

Another curious feature in this text is the use of the indeclinable particle idha, meaning 'here, in this place', and especially 'in this world or present existence' (PED). To remind us, the one who is radiating the brahmavihāras knows:

‘yaṃ kho me idaṃ kiñci pubbe iminā karajakāyena pāpakammaṃ kataṃ, sabbaṃ taṃ idha vedanīyaṃ; na taṃ anugaṃ bhavissatī’ti.

I read:

All of that evil action done by me by this action-made body at sometime in the past must be experienced here (idha). It does not follow along.

It's possible that Bodhi's Pali text has idha for idaṃ (4th word), I haven't checked the PTS edition, but otherwise his translation again seems slightly off when he refers to "Whatever bad deed I did here...", because in the CST text "here" is not specified. In any case we have a very intriguing statement about karma in this passage. Apparently the consequences of actions performed in the past do not follow one from life to life. They are to be experienced here (idha vedanīya). In fact this contradicts the opening lines of the Pāli sutta which say that the fruits of actions may arise to be experienced here and now (diṭṭheva dhamme upapajje), in the after-life (apare), or in due course (pariyāye). So again we are left wondering. If this an error or does it represent a minority report on karma? The trouble is that the idea is stated twice: sabbaṃ taṃ idha vedanīyaṃ'all that is to be experienced here' and then na taṃ anugaṃ bhavissati'it will not follow along'. It is not accidental.

This last part is phrased curiously. "That", i.e. the evil action done formerly through the action-born-body (pubbe iminā karajakāyena pāpakammaṃ kataṃ), "will not become anuga." Anuga is an adjective from anu√gam a verb meaning 'to follow [along, after]'. So rather than saying the action will not follow (anugamissati) the Pāḷi says that it does not become (bhavissati) something which is anuga 'following or followed by'. The obvious interpretation is that the action determines one's rebirth, but does not follow one beyond death. This is interesting because it may well constitute a version of karma which is easier for some people to swallow.

Buddhaghosa fudges this by defining the phrase as diṭṭhadhamma-vedanīya-koṭṭhāsavan"possessing a share to be experienced here and now". This brings it into line with Theravāda orthodoxy, but the text very specifically says all (sabba) not just a share (koṭṭhāsa).

Again the Madhyāgama text is different (T 1.438.a21-22):

比丘應作是念：『我本放逸，作不善業，是一切今可受報，終不後世。』

Bhikṣus 比丘 you should 應作是 think 念, “I 我 was formerly 本 heedless 放逸, I did 作 unskilful deeds 不善業, may 可 all 一切 retribution 報 be 是 suffered 受 now 今 and not in the other world 終不後世."

Rather than insisting that results must be experienced now, MĀ has a more plausible (i.e more orthodox) plea that it all be experienced now rather than later so as not to draw out the process across lifetimes. The wording is very different, so it cannot be a simple misreading. Is AN the sentiment of a heterodox sect whose views were included in the Pāḷi Canon. And MĀ a more orthodox rendering of the story? Is one text garbled, or the other edited for clarity? We just don't know.

Conclusion

This is certainly an intriguing text. On face value it is a heterodox view on karma and rebirth. But it does not quite make sense on its own terms. Buddhaghosa shoehorns it into his orthodox Theravāda worldview in a way that is not entirely convincing. The Madhyāgama version of the story contradicts the Pāḷi precisely where it departs from orthodoxy. Though as we saw in relation to antarābhava the different Nikāya/Āgama recensions do reflect sectarian concerns.

The Madhyāgama text seems to be based on the same story, but records the details differently. The titles of the text are different and MĀ does not have an equivalent of the key Pāli term karajakāya'action-born-body'. The MĀ text is titled 思經 The Sutra on Intention (cetanā). Overall the MĀ text is less problematic than the Pāḷi, but this may be because the Gāndhārī had more time to be edited than the Pāḷi before being committed to writing, or because the Chinese translators further smoothed out difficulties. On the other hand we can deduce that a large part of the Pāḷi text was lost after it was included in the Aṅguttara collection. So who knows what other changes it went through.

This is precisely the kind of wrinkle that scholars have overlooked or smoothed over in their accounts of Buddhist karma to date. It does not fit the view that the Canon is all the work of one mind, or the assertion that variations can be traced to a single source. All too often we see a plurality of Buddhist views, which are frequently incompatible and do not point to a single point of origin. As I have said previously, the early Buddhist texts represent the event horizon of an historical black hole. No information can ever come out of that black hole and it will always remain dark. All we can do is look at what we do see and conjecture about how it might have come about.

A fundamental problem I have identified is the overwhelming bias towards seeing history in terms of singular origin as represented in the tree as a metaphor for evolution. So engrained is this metaphor that it is very difficult to even think of other possibilities in evolution (particularly of recombination and synthesis). So we expect that Pāḷi and Chinese sources point to a common origin. Some aspects of the two texts are similar enough to suggest some common ancestry. Had the Pāḷi not become fragmented after being collected, then perhaps this similarity would be more striking. But there is no way, for example, to construct an ur-text from what we have. There is no obvious single underlying text that would give rise to the variants we have. The history is complex and now hidden from us.

For me the idea that our history does not converge in the past has only emerged from years of studying early Buddhist texts and paying attention to inconsistencies. And there are far more inconsistencies than any Buddhist teacher and almost all scholars would have us believe. Inconsistency is a feature of the early Buddhist texts. That the Pali Canon preserves views which are not consistent with Theravāda orthodoxy is both interesting and useful. It suggests that the Theravādins preserved these texts, but that other unknown factors were at work in the collection process. Perhaps the Theravāda sect was once more diverse than it presently is with respect to doctrine. Buddhaghosa, as we see in his commentary on this sutta, had an homogenizing effect. At the very least we must think of the Pāḷi texts as a much more heterogeneous body of literature than we have previously.

~~oOo~~

Thanks to Dhīvan and Sarah from our Pāḷi reading group for input on the tricky passages. It is so great to have people to talk to about these things.

Bibliography

My essays on karma & rebirth are collected under the afterlife tab at the top of the page.

Pāḷi texts from CST. Chinese texts from CBETA.

Attwood, Jayarava. (2014) Escaping the Inescapable: Changes in Buddhist Karma. Journal of Buddhist Ethics Vol. 21. http://blogs.dickinson.edu/buddhistethics/2014/06/04/changes-in-buddhist-karma/

Bingenheimer, Marcus [Ed.] (2013) The Madhyama Āgama: Middle Length Discourses, Taishō Vol. 2, No.26 (BDK English Tripiṭaka Series). Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai America.

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

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

I've already done some work on comparing translation styles between 4th century Chinese translators of the Āgamas and 20th/21st century English translators of the Pali texts (Attwood 2012). Where terms are unique or obscure the strategies available are quite limited. One can try to preserve the Indic word untranslated using your native script to represent the Indic sounds or with an Indic script such as Siddham; or one can substitute a similar word from one's own language, e.g. when the word occurs in a list of similar items (types of bird for example) one can substitute a familiar kind of bird; or, at a pinch one can ignore the difficult term; All of these approaches have their pros and cons, especially when seen in the light of centuries of hindsight.

But we have some problems with more familiar common words as well. I've been thinking about some of the common epithets of the founder of Buddhist: buddha, tathāgata, sugata, arhat, and bhagavat. These words are devilish to translate into natural sounding English. We end up with a string of phrases in the form "The X One" and/or with meaningless literal translations like "the Thus Gone" or "the Well Gone". None of these work very well as translations. The translations don't convey any more information than the untranslated terms, so add nothing to the comprehension of the text. A phrase like "Thus Gone" still requires translation to be comprehensible. With a translation like "Thus Gone" we might actually be worse off because whereas we might pass over the untranslated tathāgata without much thought, when we see the English words "Thus Gone" we may be tempted to stop and think about them and tie our selves in knots trying to figure what they mean.

Bhagavat

The most successful of the standard translations is probably "the Blessed One" for bhagavat. We're still in awkward territory with the phrasing but at least it conveys something of the Indic and evokes an image in the Western mind. To be blessed, in English, is to have the grace of God, often bestowed by a priest, or to have good luck. Neither of which apply here. The word bhaga comes from the root √bhaj'to divide, to share' and means 'a share'. The suffix vat or vant (Skt or Pali) indicates possession. So bhagavat means 'one who has their share'. In an earlier essay I explored how Buddhaghosa explained what the word means: see Yāska, Plato, and Sound Symbolism (2008).

Apparently, bhagavat is originally a military term meaning one who has a share in the spoils of war; or a feudal term for a lord is entitled to a share of his vassals production (the forerunner of taxation). Hence, perhaps, many older texts translate bhagavat as "Lord" (though this might also be imitation of the King James Bible). In the Buddhist context we sometimes also see it translated as the "Fortunate One", again with the suggestion of good luck - and the Buddha's awakening was nothing to do with luck! But "blessed" is a good one word translation. We have an English name from the Latin benedictus meaning "blessed" which is Benedict.

One of the tricks that English linguists have when they want to mark a word as serious or sacred is to either use a Latin form or to Latinise it. Thus where Freud wrote in the vernacular about the Ich, Es and Über-Ich the English translators adopted the Latin words ego, id, and super-ego. In becoming Latin the word acquires a substance so that we all think of "the ego" as a thing nowadays even though Freud conceived of it as a process. Such a word also acquires the gravitas of medical terminology since doctors still prefer Latin, or Latinate, to Anglo-Saxon or vulgar (i.e. common) terms for body parts and processes.Of course Germans capitalise all nouns, but the capitalisation of Ego, etc. helped to reinforce this perception.

Another trick, widely employed by Buddhist translators is to adopt Sanskrit syntax for English words. Thus we see the creation of a Buddhist Hybrid English that employs Sanskrit word order, but it is done in imitation of the 17th century King James Bible. As in "Say not so, Ānanda, say not so" for mā hevaṃ, ānanda, mā hevaṃ or "Enlightenment" (capitalised) for bodhi. Likewise Chinese translators created a Buddhist hybrid Chinese (based on Middle Chinese) which retained Indic word order.

It is true that vulgar English has moved away from Latin forms, if only because the teaching of Latin, which used to be a universal part of education, has fallen away. Where once every educated person was familiar with the Latin and Greek classics in the original, nowadays such knowledge is rare. And yet here we are trying to introduce Sanskrit and Pali words into the language. One might argue that "Benedictus" conveys both the meaning and spirit of the Bhagavat at least as well as "the Lord" or "the Blessed One". However for some the use of Latin is tied to experience of the Catholic Church rather than Horace or Virgil.

The standard Chinese translation is 世尊 world-honoured, i.e. honoured by the world. I'm much less familiar with the history of these Chinese terms.

Tathāgata & Sugata

Tathāgata and sugata may really be untranslatable and the common translations are all quite hopeless in that they communicate nothing. Indeed Buddhists may long have misunderstood the meaning of these words. Richard Gombrich has pointed out that -gata at the end of a compound means 'relating to, existing in'. Some examples include:

antar-gata - in the middle
kaṇṭha-gata - reaching the throat
guru-gata - belonging to a particular teacher
nīca-gata - at the lowest point
bhūmi-gata - fallen to earth, on the ground
mukha-gata - in the mouth, in the face
hṛdaya-gata - dwelling in the heart

Of course it can also take the more obvious meaning of a past passive participle, i.e. 'gone', but the special meaning has some advantages. Tathā is a modal adjectival pronoun: 'thus, that way, in that manner, like that'. We can see where the more usual translations of tathāgata might have come from: he is 'one who has gone in that way'. However tathā-gata might also mean something like 'one who resides in that state', i.e. one who is awakened. Paul Harrison's Vajracchedikā translation uses Realised One for this term, which I quite like. Some consider that there an ambiguity with tathāgata because it might also result from tathā-āgata where āgata means 'come'. I think this is pretty unlikely, especially given the unambiguous sugata, but some lineages see it as the primary sense of the word and in this sense it is translated as "Thus Come". Chinese texts translate tathāgata as 如來 "as come". Even if this were the meaning, what does a reader make of "The Thus Come One"?

Similarly su is a prefix meaning 'complete, well, or good' (cognate with Latin eu- and in euphony, euphemism, euphonium etc.). Sugata then means 'completed, one who is well, in a good state'. The fashion at present is to leave these two epithets untranslated and perhaps to footnote the most common interpretation of the Indic. The standard translations of "the Thus Gone" and "the Well Gone" really don't communicate anything. There is a Latin word which has more or less the same meaning as sugata which is beatus from which we get words like beatify. Beatus carries the connotation of blessed, but also of happiness. When a person is "beatified" (beatus + facere'to make') by the Catholic Church, the first step on path to sainthood, the implication is that they are even now experiencing eternal bliss. This is also the implication of sugata. I know one woman called Beata, and I suspect it's a relatively common name in some Slavic/Catholic countries.

Sugata is translated into Chinese as 善逝 'well gone'. Where the character 善 is also used for Sanskrit words like kalyāṇa (beautiful), kuśala (expert, wholesome), and śubha (lovely, beautiful). Apparently they could not make up their minds where the Buddha was coming 來 or going 逝! In a weird quirk of history 逝 now means 'dead, passed away' in Mandarin. So in modern Chinese 善逝 means 'well dead'.

Arhat

The other common epithet is arhat (Skt) or arahant (Pali). This is from the verbal root √arh which means 'to be worthy, to have a claim, to be able, to be allowed'. The present participle arhat (Pali arahant) means 'worthy, capable, entitled, deserving'. According to PED it was used in pre-Buddhist times as an honorific for those in high office, similar to 'His Worship', and in a sense very close in meaning to bhagavat (one who is entitled to a share). We might think of it as referring to someone who has claimed to have done what needed to be done in the holy life (brahmacārya) which is how it is often phrased in the texts. The arhat is effectively a 'saint' from Latin sanctus'holy, consecrated'.

There is a folk etymology for arhat as well. This derives the word from ari-√han'to strike an/the enemy' or sometimes 'foe-destroyer'. This etymology was given a boost by Richard Gombrich, who has has argued that the present participle is "jarring" in this context and there is perfectly good adjective from the same root, i.e. araha. Since Jains used two Prakrit forms of the word arahanta and arihanta, the folk etymology may well be the correct etymology, Gombrich argues that this stems from the same metaphor as the Jain title "jina" or conqueror, from which jaina means 'connected with the jina' (2009: 57-8).

The Chinese term is 阿羅訶 which is a transliteration pronounced āluóhē or 阿羅漢 āluóhàn. It is perhaps best known in the abbreviated form 羅漢 luóhàn.

Saṁbuddha and Samyaksaṁbuddha

Perhaps the most difficult to translate when used an an epithet is samyaksaṁbuddha. Samyañc means 'accord, concord, agreement' (literally 'bending together'). My understanding of this term is that it refers to the being in sync with the way things are (and its opposite mithyā means to be out of sync). Saṁ means 'complete, together' and buddha as we know is the past participle of √budh'to know, to understand, to wake up to'. So saṁbuddha means something like 'fully cognisant'. And samyaksaṁbuddha means 'fully cognisant of the way things are' though it is usually translated as "fully and perfectly awakened", where samyañc is somewhat reduced in significance to just mean 'perfectly', which plays to Romantic tendencies in Buddhism.

As often happens there are many different Chinese translations of this term: 正徧知 or 正遍知 or 正等覺. We also find partial transliterations such as: 三耶三佛 sānyésānfó and 三耶三佛陀 sānyésānfótuó where 佛 is a translation of Buddha and 三耶三 transliterates saṃyak-saṃ-.

Epithets and Titles

Clearly these epithets fall somewhere between names and titles. An epithet is something which is "put on" from the Greek epi'in addition' + tithenai"to put". A name we hang on something. Sometimes we resort to epithets because the name of the person concerned is taboo. The Buddha seems to have forbidden his disciples from using his personal name (Ariyapariyesanā Sutta). An epithet might also be used when a person's name is prosaic and followers wish to highlight some aspect of their character or recall some event or achievement. All of these seem to apply to the Buddha.

It is interesting to compare the ecclesiastical titles adopted by Tibetan priests in exile. Amongst the Tibetans we find a variety of His Holinesses and His Eminences. In fact these come from the Roman Catholic Church. A Pope is addressed as His Holiness or Your Holiness, and a Cardinal as His/Your Eminence. If we were also to ape the Catholics then the most common form of address to the Buddha would be, bhagavan (vocative case) = Your Holiness. But these titles are finely tuned to indicate hierarchies and to indicate power and subordination. They now have a medieval ring to them which no longer trips of the tongue (though arguably the Tibetan priesthood get on very well with them). Roman ecclesiastical titles are surely inappropriate to the Buddha, if not to Tibetan priests, and got quite a strong negative reaction when I tried them out on a few friends. The words under discussion are not really titles anyway. In fact they're adjectives rather than nouns and they all describe someone who has had a particular kind of life changing experience.

Other forms of address are routinely taken over from ecclesiastic or temporal hierarchies. For example "Venerable" seems to substitute for āyuṣmat'possessing life, vital, long lived, elder'. Buddhist monks are routinely referred to as "The Venerable". In the FPMT I've met the Venerable Robina Courtin and the Venerable George Churinoff for example. The word "venerable" comes from the Latin venerari"to worship, revere" and means 'fit to be worshipped or revered'. No doubt some monks are fit to be worshipped, but it's a rather grand title unrelated to the Indic term for an elder. In early times Europeans were more automatically respectful towards their elders, nowadays hardly anyone commands respect.

Buddha is of course an Anglicised term and hardly needs much explanation, though too many people mistake him for the Chinese god 布袋 Bùdài the so called "Laughing Buddha". For new-comers the epithets are inevitably odd and difficult to understand. And when they ask questions it quickly becomes apparent that no one really knows what they mean. No one does any more. And yet we have to keep repeating these words because they crop up so often in the texts.

Whether Latin words would aid or hinder us in communicating our history and ideas is moot. No doubt some people recoil at the very thought of using archaic Latin to communicate modern Buddhism, and for others it invokes the Catholic Church, though personally I find I associate Latin mainly with medicine, the Romans, and early Enlightenment writers such as Newton's Principia Mathematica and Hooke's Micrographia. And yet on the whole Pali and Sanskrit are more archaic and foreign to the ear than Latin or Greek. I find that most of my colleagues want to use English (or their mother tongue) most of the time and only use the minimum of Indian jargon. Most cannot tell the difference between Sanskrit and Pali.

On the other hand, English is a language which is more than happy to borrow words from other languages. For example from Hindi we borrowed: shampoo, pyjamas and bangle; or from Persian: caravan, divan, ghoul, jackal and shawl. However the problem here is that most of these are concrete nouns. They have a specific referent and there is no doubt what they refer to.

I don't really see any resolution to the problem of translating the epithets. They all apply specifically to the Buddha (though some are borrowed from other contexts), but the specific meaning is long lost. So we're left with all these different ways of referring to the Buddha, none of which really convey anything meaningful to anyone any more that forced to retain them because they are traditional. They only value they have nowadays is as shibboleths, i.e. the ability to pronounce these terms is a marker of Buddhist identity.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Attwood, Jayarava. Translation Strategies for the Cūḷa-Māluṅkya Sutta and its Chinese Counterparts. Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies. Vol 5, 2012. http://www.ocbs.org/ojs/index.php/jocbs/article/view/54.

Gombrich, Richard. 2009. What the Buddha Thought. London, Equinox.

One of my long time fascinations is with the Pali Kaccānagotta Sutta or Sanskrit Kātyāyana Sūtra. It survives in three versions: Pāḷi, Chinese, and Sanskrit. It is fairly well known that Nāgārjuna quotes a Sanskrit version of this text in his Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (MMK 15.7). It's less well known that a number of Mahāyāna Sūtras appear to quote this sūtra as well. Long term I would like to do a complete survey of how this text was used in Buddhism over time, but we can say that it forms an important link between Mahāyāna and Mainstream forms of Buddhism. Some very useful reading on this subject can be found in Salvini (2011). There is also some discussion focussed on MMK in Kalupahana (1986).

In this essay I'll translate and discuss a passage from the first chapter of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra and argue that it recapitulates the argument about dharmas from the Kātyāyana. The implication here is that Kātyāyana provides a conceptual continuity link between trends of Buddhism. It represents a truth about experience that is widely acknowledged by different Buddhist schools of thought.

In my next blog essay I'll be exploring some important ideas about the history of the early Mahāyāna. One thing that has emerged recently is that Mahāyāna texts were almost certainly composed orally and in Prakrit. In the case of the Aṣṭa we have physical evidence in the form of a birch bark manuscript, written in the Gāndhārī Prakrit in Kharoṣṭhī script and carbon dated to the first century CE (the mid-point for the probability curve is 79 CE). So the Sanskrit text is a translation. Aṣṭa might have been translated into Sanskrit as late as the 5th century CE. This undermines the claim of the Sanskrit version of Aṣṭa (or any Mahāyāna text) to be "the original". In some ways the early translations into Chinese might better represent the original text, though this is debatable.

The passage that I want to explore is Chapter 1, section 19; Vaidya (1960). In Conze's translation (1973) this passage occurs on p.87-88. My translation is:

When that was said, the Bhagavan said this to Elder Śāriputra, "thus training, Śāriputra, the bodhisattva mahāsattva does not train in any dharma. What is the reason for it? For the dharmas do not exist in the way that the foolish, ignorant hoi polloi take them to exist."

Elder Śāriputra said, "How then do they exist, Bhagavan?"

The Bhagavan said, "They exist as though they don't exist. Not-being found in that sense they are said to be unfound (avidye). The foolish, ignorant hoi polloi are engrossed in them. All dharmas imagined by them are non-existing. Having imagined them, they are obsessed by the two extremes. They don’t know or see those dharmas. Therefore all dharmas they imagine are non-existing. Having imagined [the non-existing dharmas] the are engrossed in the two extremes; engrossed they rely on the observed object as a basis and imagine dharmas in the past, in the future, and in the present moment. Having imagined them they become engrossed in name and form. Non-existing all-dharmas are imagined by them. Imagining those non-existing all-dharmas, they do not know and do not see the path as it really is. Not knowing or seeing the path as it really is they don’t depart from the triple realm and do not awaken to the highest truth. They go by the name “fools”. They do not develop faith in the true dharma. The bodhisattva mahāsattva does not become engrossed in any dharma, Śāriputra."

Typically Conze manages to make this section paradoxical. He has dharmas both existing and not existing at the same time, which does not make sense on any terms. For Conze such non-sense is a way of pointing to a transcendent, ineffable truth that words are incapable of communicating. Supposedly, the contradiction temporarily confuses the rational mind (as conceived) and allows the intuitive mind (as conceived) to make an intuitive leap to the transcendent truth. There are many false assumptions here about the nature of reason^† and imagination.

† See for example: Reasoning and Beliefs. (10 Jan 2014)

The important point of the Kātyāyana is that existence (astitā) and non-existence (nāstitā) are not terms that can be applied to dharmas qua mental objects. The typical Mahāyāna explanation, following the Two Truths doctrine is that dharmas both exist and do not exist. Kātyāyana makes sense, the Two Truths explanation does not. I believe that in this passage from Aṣṭa, the Kātyāyana argument about dharmas is being recapitulated in much the same terms, and with the same warning about what happens if we do get caught up in the dichotomy. In other words that this is in fact a tacit reference to Kātyāyana.

Perhaps it is worth rehearsing why the denial of existence and non-existence is accurate and not at all paradoxical. My starting point, as always, is to take the subject under discussion to be experience. Being naive realists, or what the text calls "foolish, ignorant hoi-polloi" (bālapṛthagjanā aśrutavanto), we have an experience and we imagine ourselves to be contact with something real, be it internal or external with respect to our first-person perspective. Ignoring what the experience implies about the world of sense experience, ignoring matters of ontology, the focus of the Kātyāyana is on the experience itself. Is the experience of an object an existing thing or a non-existing thing, irrespective of the nature of the object? Clearly the answer is that it is neither. An experience cannot be described in terms of existence or non-existence. It arises, lingers for a short time, and then passes away. But the experience itself is entirely internal to us. Two people may see the same object and agree on it's characteristics. But their experience of it is individual and cannot be agreed on. And thus Conze, in affirming both existence and non-existence, has come to precisely the opposite conclusion because he seeks a transcendent truth behind the words; a noumenon of the text. Conze's Romanticism has a Platonic flavour to it.

The answer that an experience is neither existent nor non-existent is important because it is the understanding the nature of experience that has soteriological value. We say that "things" are arising and passing away, but the Buddhist texts seem to refer mainly (if not solely) to the arising and passing away of experiences. In the Kātyāyana it says that only dukkha arises and only dukkha cease. The same point is made in the Simile of the Chariot. Dukkha here is a synonym for unenlightened experience. This search for understanding is deprecated by Conze, by modern Zen commentators, and many Tibetan lamas, because they too believe in a transcendent truth that requires the suspension of reason (as they conceive reason). In the Spiral Path texts the experience of liberation (vimutti) is initiated by becoming fed up (nibiddā) with the objects of the senses, i.e. with the intoxicating play of experience. Suspension of reason is not a prerequisite for awakening in these texts.

Central to Buddhist soteriology is the fact that our sense of self, our first person perspective, is also an experience and partakes in the nature of all experiences. Streams of sensory information converge and are woven together to create the persistent illusion of being a self. Though of course we know that the illusion of the first-person perspective can be broken by drugs, trauma, brain injury, and of course by meditation. In this view, insights consist of seeing experience, particularly the first person experience, in such a light that it ceases to intoxicate and fascinate. The word for 'insight', vipassana, literally means to 'see through', not as our translation suggests, 'to see into'.

In our naivete about experience we imagine each experience signifies something real and we respond to it as though it were real. But in addition to this we are burdened with ideas about what constitutes happiness as the goal of our lives. The unenlightened, the bālapṛthagjanā aśrutavanto, believe, deep down inside, that happiness is about having pleasant experiences and avoiding unpleasant experiences. Maximising the former and minimising the latter seems to be the operational definition of happiness. If we can only arrange things so that we have the optimum amount of both then we will be happy and free of unhappiness. For most of us this means living in a unsatisfactory compromise and a lot of self-delusion about how happy we really are. Our pleasures do not satisfy. Our pains are all too many and not the least of them is mortality!

The line of thought in the Kātyāyana is often mixed up with attempts to apply dependent arising to all kinds of other processes, particularly karma and rebirth. And I have showed how this leads to inconsistencies and incoherent statements about the nature of the world across a number of essays (see the Afterlife tab for a list). Many Buddhists end up believing that the impermanence of "things" (e.g. tables, chariots, or other physical objects) is the key teaching of Buddhism, when it's just a truism that everyone is already aware of (See Everything changes, but so what?). The Kātyāyana is one of the texts where the intent of the idea, by which I mean the application to experience and only experience, is apparent. And it was this intent that was, I argue, taken up by the Aṣṭa and by Nāgārjuna some centuries later. Although there are many loud voices arguing about what Nāgārjuna meant to say in his very confusing opus, with most of them seeing Mūla-madhyamaka-kārikā as having deep ontological implications. I say that in citing the Kātyāyana in the way that he does, we might understand his ideas better if we take the domain of application to be experience and forget about ontology. Nāgārjuna makes better, if not perfect, sense if we take him to be someone commenting on the phenomenology of experience rather than speculating about metaphysics.

In the Aṣṭa version of the idea, the author has chosen to use the words that are tricky to translate while retaining the connotations of the original. So in a key passage (Aṣṭa 1.19.4) the Buddha says to Śāriputra:

na hi te śāriputra dharmāstathā saṃvidyante yathā bāla-pṛthagjanā aśrutavanto 'bhiniviṣṭāḥ | āyuṣmān śāriputra āha - kathaṃ tarhi te bhagavan saṃvidyante? bhagavān āha - yathā śāriputra na saṃvidyante, tathā saṃvidyante evam avidyamānāḥ | tenocyante avidyeti |

"For the dharmas do not exist (na saṃvidyante) in the way that the foolish, ignorant hoi-polloi take them to exist (abhiniviṣṭāḥ)."

Elder Śāriputra said, "How then do they exist (saṃvidyante), Bhagavan?"

The Bhagavan said, "They exist as though (yathā) they don't exist. Not-being found (avidyamāna) in that sense (evaṃ), they are said to be unfound (avidyā)."

The last statement in the Sanskrit text is:

yathā śāriputra na saṃvidyante, tathā saṃvidyante evam avidyamānāḥ | tenocyante avidyeti |

Conze translates "As they do not exist, so they exist. And so, since they do not exist [avidyamāna], they are called [the result of] ignorance [avidyā]", employing his usual hermeneutic of obscurity. He also translates avidyamāna as "do not exist", but avidye as "ignorance", but by his own logic the latter ought to mean 'not existing'.

Saṃvidyante is a passive form from sam√vid. Conze translates as ‘exists’. BHSD defines it as "is found, exists’ (=vidyate ‘is found; often virtually = asti)." PED saṃvijjati² ‘to be found, to exist’. MW ‘know, recognise; perceive; approve’. It's tricky because there are two homonyms √vid meaning 'to know' (cognate with our word 'wisdom') and √vid meaning 'to find'. The two are indistinguishable except by context. The same goes for vidyamāna, a present participle 'knowing, finding' (here negated by the prefix a-). The other word here is abhiniviṣṭāḥ (abhi+ni√viṣ) which has a range of meanings 'entered or plunged into; intent on, endowed with; determined, persevering). Conze (1973a) suggests "settled down in, is accustomed to suppose."

So Conze is treating almost all the verb forms as meaning "exists". And we ought to point out that if a Sanskrit author wished to assert the existence of something they can do so very directly with the verb asti or some variation on √vṛt. So we need to be alert here to connotations. I think that √vid as found is relevant here. So say that if we go looking for a dharma is it not found, is not the same as saying it means it does not exist. We certainly have experiences, and so to that extent they do sort of exist. But when we say they "exist" we mean only that we have an experience, not that some kind of really existent entity has arisen and persists. Clearly the author of the Aṣṭa has some very like the Kātyāyana teaching in mind. And the consequences is similar in the sense that it leads to two extremes of thought: that dharmas either exist or do not exist and all the problems that this causes. And note that the Two Truth argument adopts both extremes rather than avoiding either of them. Compare Aṣta 1.19.7:

kalpayitvā dvāv antāv abhiniviśante abhiniviśya tan nidānam-upalambhaṃ niśritya atītān dharmān kalpayanti, anāgatān dharmān kalpayanti, pratyutpannān dharmān kalpayanti te kalpayitvā nāmarūpe 'bhiniviṣṭāḥ |

Having imagined [the non-existing dharmas] they are engrossed (abhiviviśante) in the two extremes (dvāv antāv); being engrossed (abhiniviśya) they rely on the observed object as a basis and imagine dharmas in the past, in the future, and in the present moment. Having imagined them they become engrossed in name and form.

Note the recurrence of abhini√viṣ here, translated as 'engrossed' this time (and as "settled down" by Conze). Taking dharmas to be real, settling into a view, we make mistakes about the nature of experience and by implication suppose that sense experience can be ultimately satisfying. And this is categorically a mistake.

It has been argued that the Aṣṭa contains no direct reference to the Sarvāstivādin doctrine of sarva-asti (always existent), but Aṣṭa 1.19.7 might be just such a reference. Here the deluded people imagine (kalpayanti) that dharmas exist in the past, future and present. This is precisely what Sarvāstivādins believe. If we recall the problem of Action at a Temporal Distance this 'always on' feature of dharmas was the Vaibāṣika solution to the disconnect between action and result in time that the the doctrine of karma requires. It earned the Vaibāṣikas the nick-name Sarvāstivāda. However after examining two of the early translations T224《道行般若經》by Lokakṣema (179 CE) and T227《小品般若經》by Kumārajīva (408 CE) both make the point about the two extremes, but neither of them have this passage about past, future and present. So we must conclude that it was interpolated into the Sanskrit text at a later date. So if criticism of Sarvāstivāda was intended, it was not part of the original intention. Kumārajīva's translation of the dvāv antāv 'two extremes' is prosaically 二邊 'two extremes', whereas Lokakṣema has the more interesting 兩癡耳 literally 'two insane ears'.

Taking the text on face value, the criticism of the two extremes (existence and non-existence) is tilted towards criticising existence. Presumably precisely because the existence view was prevalent at the time. If this interpretation is correct then it may help explain the idiom in the next sentence (1.19.8)

tair asaṃvidyamānāḥ sarvadharmāḥ kalpitāḥ |

All dharmas imagined by them are non-existing.

Kalpita is a past participle from √kḷp. The literal meaning is 'made, fabricated'. I'm presuming here that the fabrication is a mental one. There's not really a word for "imagination" in Sanskrit (one of many differences in how they understand mind). Again the idea here seems to be that one has an experience and in the way of naive realism mistakes it for something more substantial than it is. And when we treat experiences this way it obscures the Buddhist path or as Aṣṭa puts it yathābhūtaṃ mārgaṃ na jānanti na paśyanti 'Not knowing or seeing the path as it really is...'

Interestingly in 1.19.12 the wrong view is seen as an impediment to the development of faith in the truth of the dharma (satyaṃ dharmaṃ). This suggests that the mistake is foundational and must be sorted out right at the beginning of the religious life. My sense is that most modern Buddhism is already lost in speculation about ontology and supernatural forces. As Justin Whitaker recently pointed out to me ,most Buddhists and scholars still invoke some variation of "seeing reality as it is" when describing Buddhist soteriology. But reality implies existence. Whatever we see as it is (yathābhūta), it cannot be described in terms of existence or non-existence and therefore is neither real nor unreal. Reality can have nothing to do with Buddhist soteriology by definition. To be real whatever it is would have to be permanently existing and I don't think I need to explain why that is a problem.

I hope I have showed that at the very least the author of Aṣṭa had Kātyāyana in mind as they were writing this section. I think this shows that at least at the beginning of producing the Prajñāpāramitā texts the authors saw the domain of application of the Dharma as experience. They were not caught up in the metaphysical speculations of the Ābhidharmikas. They were however caught up in their own metaphysical speculations about the nature of the Buddha, though that is a story for another time. The importance of this discovery is that it helps us to understand the apparently paradoxical texts of the Prajñāpāramitā literature. In flirting with paradox they were trying to describe an attitude towards experience that had a liberating effect. They did not set out to confuse the reader, but to draw attention to our suppositions about experience and reality. The former we can know and understand, the latter we can only make inferences about, based on the commonality of experience with reference to the same object.

A first step in reforming modern Buddhism would be to establish the domain of application of our theory and practice, and in such a way as our theory and practice were complimentary. Despite all the bitching from Buddhists about the Mindfulness Therapy movement I think they have a much better handle on this focus and integration of theory and practice. Better to be working with experience in a shallow way than to have a deep engagement with the kind of ontological speculation that typifies contemporary Buddhists discourse, because the latter is not beneficial in any way while the latter at least is mildly beneficial and creates a basis for progress.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Conze, Edward. (1973). The Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines and its Verse Summary. San Francisco: City Lights.

Conze, Edward (1973a) Materials for a Dictionary of Prajñāpāramitā Literature. Suzuki Research Foundation.

Drewes, David (2009). Early Indian Mah ay ana Buddhism I: Recent Scholarship.Religion Compass 4/2 (2010): 55–65, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2009.00195.x. https://www.academia.edu/9226456/Early_Indian_Mahayana_Buddhism_I_Recent_scholarship

Kalupahana, David J. (1986) Nāgārjuna, The Philosophy of the Middle Way: Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. SUNY.

Salvini, Mattia. (2011) The Nidānasamyukta and the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā: understanding the Middle Way through comparison and exegesis. Thai International Journal of Buddhist Studies.II: 57-95. https://www.academia.edu/1925584/The_NidÄnasamyukta_and_the_M_lamadhyamakakÄrikÄ_understanding_the_Middle_Way_through_comparison_and_exegesis

Vaidya, P.L. (1960) Astasahasrika Prajnaparamita. Darbhanga: The Mithila Institute. (Buddhist Sanskrit Texts, 4). http://fiindolo.sub.uni-goettingen.de/gretil/1_sanskr/4_rellit/buddh/bsu049_u.htm

Sanskrit text

Aṣṭa 1.19. (Vaidya 1960)

evamukte āyuṣmān śāriputro bhagavantam etad avocat – evaṃ śikṣamāṇo bhagavan bodhisattvo mahāsattvaḥ katamasmin dharme śikṣate? evam ukte bhagavān āyuṣmantaṃ śāriputram etad avocat evaṃ śikṣamāṇaḥ śāriputra bodhisattvo mahāsattvo na kasmiṃś cid dharme śikṣate | tatkasya hetoḥ? na hi te śāriputra dharmāstathā saṃvidyante yathā bāla-pṛthagjanā aśrutavanto 'bhiniviṣṭāḥ | āyuṣmān śāriputra āha - kathaṃ tarhi te bhagavan saṃvidyante? bhagavān āha - yathā śāriputra na saṃvidyante, tathā saṃvidyante evamavidyamānāḥ | tenocyante avidyeti | tān bālapṛthagjanā aśrutavanto 'bhiniviṣṭāḥ | tair asaṃvidyamānāḥ sarvadharmāḥ kalpitāḥ | te tān kalpayitvā dvayor antayoḥ saktāḥ tān dharmān na jānanti na paśyanti | tasmāt te 'saṃvidyamānān sarva-dharmān kalpayanti | kalpayitvā dvāv antāv abhiniviśante abhiniviśya tan nidānam-upalambhaṃ niśritya atītān dharmān kalpayanti, anāgatān dharmān kalpayanti, pratyutpannān dharmān kalpayanti te kalpayitvā nāmarūpe 'bhiniviṣṭāḥ | tairasaṃvidyamānāḥ sarvadharmāḥ kalpitāḥ | te tān asaṃvidyamānān sarvadharmān kalpayanto yathābhūtaṃ mārgaṃ na jānanti na paśyanti | yathābhūtaṃ mārgam ajānanto 'paśyanto na niryānti traidhātukāt, na budhyante bhūtakoṭim | tena te bālā iti saṃjñāṃ gacchanti | te satyaṃ dharmaṃ na śraddhadhati | na khalu punaḥ śāriputra bodhisattvā mahāsattvā kaṃcid dharmam abhiniviśante ||

PS. If any one has a pdf of Conze's Sanskrit edition of Aṣṭa I'd love to get a copy.

The origin of the Mahāyāna has been a subject of some fascination over the years. In its mature form Mahāyāna Buddhism could hardly be more different from Mainstream Buddhism and still be thought of as Buddhism. A variety of theories have been proposed for how the Mahāyāna came about. In this article I will précis some recent articles which revise or review of the origins and development of Mahāyāna Buddhism.

Note that the articles that this essay is based on are all available on the internet via academic.edu(individual links are included in the bibliography).I highly recommend the two articles by Drewes (2010a, 2010b). They are very accessible and thought provoking. Karashima's articles are long and technical and general readers may find them a bit daunting, but they never-the-less also provide important insights (and post date Drewes by some years and thus also provide a contrast to his work).

The Name Mahāyāna

Like some other Buddhist terms coined in Prakrit, it seems Mahāyāna might have been the victim of a wrong Sanskritisation. We already suspect that sūtra'thread' ought to have been sūkta 'wise saying', both words assimilate tosutta in Pāḷi; while satva† 'being' ought to have been sakta 'committed, intent on', both satta in Pāḷi. Hence bodhisatva ought to be bodhisakta'committed to awakening', and it's possible thatmahāsakta might have signified'one who commitment is great'. Karashima (2015b) provides a comprehensive survey of the word mahāyāna in the various versions of the Lotus Sutra. He argues that the word was probably intended to be the equivalent of the Sanskrit mahājñāna 'great knowledge', but that this was pronounced mahājāna in Prakrit. There was a natural ambiguity with the word mahāyana 'great vehicle'and the Lotus Sutra plays on this to some extent (see Karahima 2015b: 215-217). Later the ambiguity resolved the wrong way and mahāyana became the standard interpretation instead of mahājñāna. So the fact that we talk about a great vehicle and not a great knowledge is a quirk of history.

†Buddhist manuscripts virtually always spell this wordsatva, so that, arguably, the correct form in Buddhist Sanskrit is satva.It has been further over-corrected tosattvaby editors to make it conform with Classical Sanskrit.

Karashima argues that the use of the word was transferred from theLotusto theAṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra(2015a: 115) where the word only occurs in the parts of the text that are considered to have been added towards the end of the composition/compilation process.

Karashima further conjectures, from his own research and work done independently by Peter Skilling (cited 2015a: 117) that the title sūtra or mahāyānasūtrais a later affectation. Such texts are frequently referred to as paripṛccha (question),nirdeśa (description), vyākaraṇa (explanation/analysis), or vyūha (arrangement/manifestation), as well as sūtra. The addition of sūtra is frequently superfluous.

Many texts have the word Mahāyāna in their title. These titles first appear around 400 CE. Karashima (2015a) shows by surveying the Chinese Canon that this was a change that happened over time. He proposes that originally they were known as 'irregular'sūtras signified by Middle Indic *vedulla = Pali vetulla, Gāndhārī *veulla or *vevulla. This corresponds to Sanskrit vaitulya. This word started appearing in Chinese texts about the 2nd century. However because of the ambiguity in the Middle Indic forms and a change in the perception of these texts, by the 5^th century the Middle-Indic word began to be interpreted as vaipulya 'extensive, incomparable'. One of the characteristics of the vedulla suttas was that they consisted of a series of questions and answers, characteristic of the paripṛccha texts but also the Prajñāpāramitā texts. Later again these vaipulya texts were renamed Mahāyāna texts.

* The asterisk here stands for a term derived from grammatical rules, but not found in any extant text.

So it seems that history has tricked us once again. As we will see below, the early Mahāyāna texts seem to have been composed in Prakrit and only translated into Sanskrit much later. Late enough for the translators to no longer have a clear understanding of the intentions of the original authors and to be mislead by the received tradition. We have so many examples of this kind of thing that we must admit that Buddhist lineages of passing on teachings were quite unreliable. Buddhist lineages amount to a game that American kids call "Telephone". The idea that because your teacher tells you they taught you what their teacher taught them, is no reason to believe that you have received reflects an unchanging tradition.

What the Mahāyāna is Not.

"Mahāyāna was not a distinct sect. It did not involve the worship of bodhisattvas. It was not developed by lay people. It was not an offshoot of the Mahāsāṃghikas. It was not a single religious movement." Drewes (2010a: 59)

Early theories

In his two articles Drewes sums up a generation of research into the early Mahāyāna. Mostly it is the story of wrong turns and false assumptions many of which have the origins in the 19th century. For example the idea that Mahāyāna was primarily a lay movement can be traced to an 1865 article by V. P Vasilev. The first actual lay origin for the Mahāyāna was put forward by Jean Przyluski in the 1920s and 1930s. Similarly the idea that the Mahāyāna involved the rejection of the (so-called) arhat ideal was first put forward by T. W. Rhys Davids in 1881. Linking Mahāyāna to the Mahāsāṃghika sect was a popular 19th century idea, being found in the works of Hendrik Kern, L. A. Waddell and T. W. Rhys Davids.

Stories of this kind proliferated and became a kind of standard narrative with some variations. The Mahāyāna was a reaction against the narrow mindedness and formalism of the Hīnayāna. Hīnayāna was portrayed as a religion in terminal decline that had preserved texts they didn't really understand (and the 19th century Sangha didn't do much to dispel this view). Mahāyāna was said to have embraced a universal ideal whereas the Hīnayāna was all about self liberation. Mahāyāna was institutionally distinct from existing forms of Buddhism. And so on. In the 1950s Japanese scholar Akira Hirakawa proposed a new theory which was that Mahāyāna was a lay movement focused on stūpa worship. (Drewes 2010a: 55)

I would observe that many of these historical narratives owe a great deal to the historical narratives of the schism in the Christian Church that gave birth to the Protestant movement, especially as perceived by Protestant Western Europeans. Protestants identify with the breakaway sect which brings with it a renewal of values and ideals, and (in their own estimation) a greater authenticity. They identify the Mainstream (in this case Roman Catholicism) as intellectually moribund (whereas the Catholic Church has always been more intellectually lively) and morally bankrupt (which was certainly true at the time of the Luther and various other points in history).

The irony is that the heartland of Protestant Buddhism was and is Theravādin Sri Lanka (the story becomes inverted without anyone quite noticing). But there never was this kind of schism in Buddhism! Or at least there is no evidence for it. Mahāyāna activity started small, operated within existing monasteries, and only very gradually over centuries came to dominate Indian Buddhism. Nor, for that matter did Theravāda dominate Sri Lanka until 10^th century reforms purged non-Theravāda Buddhism from Sri Lankan monasteries and standardised forms. Many of the features we take to be characteristic of Mahāyāna Buddhism are in fact culture norms from Tibet, China or Japan. They bear no direct relationship to Buddhism in India.

The tide began to turn in the 1970s. Greg Schopen's 1975 article introduced a new theory of Mahāyāna origins that directly challenged Hirakawa. Schopen argued that early Mahāyāna groups rejected stūpa worship in favour of what Schopen called "the cult of the book". Drewes (2007) himself critiques this seminal article at length, but it began an American led re-evaluation of the origins of Mahāyāna.

The decisive moment, however, was Paul Harrison's article "Who Gets to Ride in the Great Vehicle? Self Image and Identity Among the Followers of Early Mahāyāna." (1987). This was based on an examination of the first sūtras to be translated into Chinese. This showed that Mahāyāna was overwhelmingly a monastic movement. The texts show little desire for establishing sectarian identity. Some of them even acknowledge the legitimacy of arhatship. They do not recommend devotion to bodhisattvas. They do show a generally negative attitude towards women. (Drewes 2010a: 55-6). And so the lay origins theory died.

The Breakaway Thesis

The standard story about Mahāyāna was that it began life as a break away sect from Mahāsāṃghika. There are several highly contradictory accounts of the schism at the second council which saw the conservative Sthāviras split from the more progressive Mahāsāṃghikas over matters relating to Pratimokṣa rules. Here I find the only bum note in Drewes analysis. He describes this theory of Mahāsāṃghika origin as having died a quiet death. However Karashima apparently disagrees because he continues to see, for example, the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra as being connected with Mahāsāṃghika (2013). However, the part about Mahāyāna being a breakaway sect is deprecated both for lack of evidence and for positive evidence of continued coexistence for many centuries between the Mainstream and the so-called Breakaways. In fact what evidence we do have suggests that there was only ever one kind of ordination lineage in Indian (Nikāya^†), there was no distinct Mahāyāna ordination, and no distinct Mahāyāna institutions. Harrison argued that there was no way to determine any sectarian affiliation of the early Mahāyāna.

† The word nikāya is used in different ways, but here means "a group". The nikāya ordinations are basically the same the Buddhist world over. Theravādins also use the term nikāya to indicate ordination lineages within their school.

Mahāyāna Buddhism appears to have developed slowly. It certainly produced many texts in the early centuries, but little hard evidence. Schopen has noted a single statue of Amitābha, broken off at the ankle, but labelled as such on the pedestal, dating from ca. 153 CE. The oldest epigraphical^‡ evidence dates from the 4^th or 5^th centuries CE.

‡ Epigraphical evidence is from inscriptions typically carved into stone at a Buddhist site. Many record donations of money, often from monks.

Once we strip away all the unsupported conjectures and suppositions about Mahāyāna, little remains. There was no "the Mahāyāna" per se (and I have tried to avoid the definite article in this essay). We know, from epigraphical, textual and eye-witness reports of Chinese pilgrims that Mahāyāna monks lived alongside Mainstream monks in the same monasteries. These monks were mainly concerned with the production and spread of new Buddhists texts, a major preoccupation of the texts themselves. Over many centuries the emphasis of monasteries changed so that Mahāyāna ideas and values predominated, but the ordination lineages remained the same (as they do in Tibet and parts of China to this day). According to Drewes, there were reactions, but these were by the Mainstream against Mahāyāna, or indeed by one branch of Mahāyāna against another. There was no Mahāyāna reaction against the Mainstream. There was a slow evolution over at least 600-800 years.

Karashima, however, points out that in second stratum of the Lotus Sūtra the dharmabhāṇaka (Dharma preacher) proclaiming the Lotus Sutra were "harshly criticised, slandered for having composed the kāvyas (i.e. the Lotus Sutra itself) and for propagating a heresy" and thus "it is evident that their belief was a very dangerous heresy in the eyes of the Buddhist authorities of that time" (2015a: 115). Similarly Schopen argues that Mahāyāna authors were defensive with respect to the Mainstream. Discussing the Ratnāvalī, a text attributed to Nāgārjuna:

"Even in the hands of one of its most clever advocates it does not appear as an independent, self-confident movement sweeping all before it as... But rather—and as late as the second or third century—it appears as an embattled movement struggling for acceptance." (Schopen 2005: 7)

And also:

"Sociologists, however, who have studied sectarian groups in a variety of contexts have shown that [the sort of characterization found in the Ratnāvalī] is typical of small, embattled groups on the fringes or margins of dominant, established parent groups."(Schopen 2005: 9)

This suggests that Drewes is playing down the antagonism between Mahāyāna and the Mainstream. It seems clear that Mahāyāna believers did co-exist with Mainstream Buddhists, but they did not necessarily co-exist without tensions and conflicts.

The Role of Texts

It seems that in trying to understand Mahāyāna we have placed too much emphasis on the proliferation of texts. Too many assumptions were made about the conditions under which a religious group might produce and transmit new texts. Here again we can point to the influence of Protestantism. To our Euro-centric minds, the production of new texts must be preceded by schism and must represent irreconcilable differences. But this assumption does not apply in India generally. The history of Indian religions is very different from the history of Christianity in Europe, especially as seen through Protestant eyes. Buddhist India was far more pluralistic that Christian India; more tolerant of heterodoxy, though polemics do survive; and more likely to syncretise.

For some time it seemed that Schopen was right to say that "each text placed itself at the centre of its own cult" (cited in Drewes 2010a: 59). However Drewes calls this into question. Firstly there was no evidence of distinct Mahāyāna communities. Mahāyāna existed within the Mainstream institutional framework. Some have pointed to the divergent doctrinal views of Mahāyāna texts as evidence requiring distinct cults, but Drewes counters that accepting the authenticity of texts with divergent points of views is not a problem today and there is no evidence that it ever was. Drewes suggests that the different sūtras probably reflect the ideas of different authors rather than distinct communities.

So, Mahāyāna was primarily a literary movement, operating within and alongside mainstream Buddhism. It was unlikely to have been a unified movement.

We now have good evidence in the form of the old Aṣṭasāhasrikā manuscript described by Karashima and Falk that the first Prajñāpāramitā texts were composed and/or compiled in Gandhāra in the local language, Gāndhārī (see Karashima 2013).

It is fairly certain however that writing was in use before the development of Mahāyāna. Drewes notes one Mainstream text with a 2σ range 184-46BCEand another with 2σ range 206BCE- 59CE(2010a: 60). The mid points of these ranges are 110 BCE and 146 BCE respectively. But on the whole it seems that Mahāyāna textual practices were not different from Mainstream practices and Drewes notes that the distinction between categories like "oral" and "written" is not hard and fast in India. Even written texts are memorised and studied orally.

As Drewes points out, contra to a popular theory, there is no evidence that Mahāyāna Sūtras were initially composed in written form (2010a: 60). Karashima (2015a: 113) reinforces the point that the texts were most likely composed orally in Prakrit. He proposes a rough time line:

Oral transmission in Prakrit. 1^st Century BCE.
Oral transmission in Prakrit. Written Prakrit in Kharoṣṭhī script. 1^st~3^rd centuries CE.
Broken Sanskrit mixed with Prakrit. 2^nd~3^rd centuries CE.
(Buddhist) Sanskrit. Written in Brāhmī script. 3^rd/4^th centuries onwards.

Drewes places the translation into Sanskrit about a century later than Karashima, i.e. 4^th/5^thcentury.

To sound a contrary note I have to point out that propagating a literature is generally a community activity. Written texts require a medium, ink, and implements, all of which suggest an economy in which such things were either produced or could be bought. For oral texts to survive for any length of time they must be memorised by more than one person at a time. But such communities could have existed as cliques within monasteries.

Forest Dwelling Bodhisatvas

Paul Harrison (1992) and Reginald Ray(1994) independently floated the idea that forest dwelling ascetics were a significant influence on the development of Buddhism generally and Mahāyāna specifically. The idea seems to have caught on and many scholars have found textual support for this thesis, not least Jan Nattier in her 1993 bookA Few Good Men. Indeed if the heart of the Mahāyāna was in forest renunciants then this would explain the lack of inscriptional evidence (though for the same reason it is inconsistent with written texts).

The forest renunciate is a Romantic figure, or at least a focus for Romantic projections, both for their mode of life and for the location of it in wild nature. They are saintly, dedicated to religious practices, especially self-denial, and is associated in many cultures with sacredness. Research has shown that such personal sacrifices are important in encouraging the faith of ordinary people (see Martyrs Maketh the Religion). Thus the forest renunciate appeals to the Romantic aspect of modernist world view and self view.

However as Drewes remarks "The main problem with the forest hypothesis is that Mahāyāna sūtras, the final court for any theory of early Mahāyāna, provide little support for it." (2010a 61). Of course the texts do mention forest dwelling, but it is hardly the sine qua non of Buddhist practice in most early Mahāyāna texts. Some texts, e.g. the Aṣṭasāhasrikā, even discourage it! The majority of Mahāyāna texts seem to be concerned with easy practices that enable one to get out of saṃsāra with the minimum of effort.

Ray turns out to have used a very narrow selection of texts to justify his thesis (and those only in translation). He excludes the large majority of the texts that have been translated, let alone of those which are preserved in Sanskrit, Chinese and Tibetan. But what is worse is that the texts he does cite frequently undermine his thesis on closer examination. For example he cites the Ratnaguṇasamcayagāthā as advocating forest dwelling, when in fact it explicitly discourages it! (Drewes 2010a: 62). Jan Nattier's forest dwelling thesis is also, I hate to say, built on shaky ground. It is based on one text, the Ugraparipṛcchā Sūtra, that is admittedly very early, but "advocates forest dwelling and monasticism inconsistently" (Drewes 2010a: 62). Her other contribution focusses on Akṣobhya's pure land, but here also she seems to overlook the ease with which practitioners are promised entry to Abhirati. "Nattier's general idea that earlier forms of Mahāyāna advocated difficult, jātaka-like practices and that easy means of practice were developed only later has no obvious evidentiary support" (Drewes 2010a: 62).

Clearly forest dwelling played a continuing part in Buddhism. It is evidently an important practice for Mainstream Buddhists, but Mahāyāna texts are equivocal about the benefits. They seem to prefer other kinds of practice; often much easier practices.

The Bodhisatva Ideal.

The earlier models of Mahāyāna Buddhism had a break-away group who rejected the arhat ideal in favour of the new bodhisatva ideal. We've seen that the break-away thesis is wrong, that the arhat ideal was not rejected in all early Mahāyāna texts. And in fact there is no strong evidence that the bodhisatva ideal was particularly influential in Mahāyāna. We also know that the bodhisatva ideal was not missing from the early Buddhist texts. But a number of other characteristics distinguish Mahāyāna texts from Mainstream texts:

expanded cosmologies and mythical histories
pure lands
'celestial' Buddhas and bodhisatvas
descriptions of powerful new religious practices
new ideas on the nature of the Buddha
a range of new philosophical perspectives.

There's nothing in the actual texts to suggest that the bodhisatva ideal was either the cause of the others, or that it was more prominent than the other characteristics (Drewes 2010b: 66-67). So it seems the focus on the bodhisatva idea is a retrospective emphasis, and the insistence that it was not found in Mainstream Buddhism is a straw man argument, a mistake or a disingenuous piece of misinformation.

Conclusions

A generation of scholarship has transformed our understanding of the origins and early development of Mahāyāna Buddhism. However, that scholarly understanding has yet to fully permeate the Buddhist community. Certainly when I got involved in Buddhism in the early 1990s the standard narrative was still basically the 19th century one. I believe that it survives largely intact. Part of the reason might be that it strikes at Buddhist self-views and identity building narratives. My understanding of religious belief is that these are the beliefs that are most resistant to counterfactual arguments. Judging by how reluctantly Buddhists have received the knowledge that the Heart Sutra is an apocryphal Chinese text, I suspect that it will be some time before Buddhists catch up with the academy on this, if they ever do.

A significant drawback in Drewes' articles is that they only relate the etic view, i.e. the views of European and American scholars. They tell us little or nothing of the emic, i.e. of what Buddhists themselves thought about Mahāyāna. I think it likely that etic views were formed in part by the normative stories told by Buddhists themselves. The views held by Western scholars were almost certainly informed by existing Buddhist narratives. It would be useful to know more about the process of view forming amongst these early scholars and the extent to which they were simply repeating what Buddhists themselves believed about their own history.

It is quite significant if the Buddhist normative stories are at odds with the actual history that we can derive from textual and archaeological studies. My sense is that many of the false stories about the origins of the Mahāyāna are promoted by the sectarian followers of Mahāyāna in order to bolster their own prestige. Buddhists often seem to see themselves as being in a competition to present (and represent) the most "authentic" or most "authoritative" version of Buddhism. Or else they are justifying their own heterodoxy. Many of theses historical narrative are dismissive of Mainstream Buddhism, which in light of the actual history now seems bizarre. And the competitive side of Buddhists is still evident in the present.

This new historical paradigm may well shed new light on old debates about the sectarian affiliations of the some more prominent Mahāyāna śāstra writers, like Nāgārjuna and Vasubandhu. The idea that these writers could have a foot in both camps no longer seems odd. Assigning them to either Mainstream or Mahāyāna might be to misunderstand where their loyalties lay. It is only our perception of sectarian divides that make us struggle to place a figure Nāgārjuna who both cites āgama texts and uses Mahāyāna ideas like śūnyatā. As monk Nāgārjuna can only have been ordained in a Mainstream lineage, because that was the only kind of Buddhist ordination. Perhaps it was entirely natural at the time to have loyalty to a conservative ordination lineage and an innovative textual tradition at the same time.

Drewes argues against the use of the term Mainstream Buddhism largely because different scholars have used it in widely varying ways. He suggests non-Mahāyāna, but I disagree. It would be better to have a positive term for what was, after all, the mainstream of Buddhism for a millennium, and to seek a consensus on how it is used. Defining the mainstream in terms of not being part of a minority movement seems perverse. In light of this new picture that has emerged, "Mainstream" seems the best candidate yet as a term to contrast the Mahāyāna tendency in Buddhism over a period of many centuries.

I've noted a few points of discussion and disagreement. These ought not to distract from overview provided by Drewes. Overall these articles are an important contribution to our understanding of the history of Buddhism. The articles benefit from being well written and organised. Although many scholars contributed to the change in worldview, to see all that work expertly summarised is quite an experience. It brings with it that frisson that the true intellectual feels when they experience a paradigm shift. One's worldview does not simply adjust to the new knowledge, but the new knowledge restructures the world view. The case Drewes makes seems to sit on firm foundations and to completely supersede the legacy view of Mahāyāna. Personally I love it when this happens. Everything we thought we knew was wrong. Fantastic!

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Drewes, David.

(2007) Revisiting the Phrase “sa prṛthivīpradeśaś caityabhūto bhavet” and the Mahāyāna Cult of the Book. Indo-Iranian Journal 50: 101–143DOI 10.1007/s10783-007-9052-z https://www.academia.edu/9225110/Revisiting_the_phrase_sa_prthivipradesas_caityabhuto_bhavet_and_the_Mahayana_cult_of_the_book
(2010a). Early Indian Mahāyāna Buddhism I: Recent Scholarship. Religion Compass 4/2: 55-65. DOI:10.1111/j.1749-8171.2009.00195.x https://www.academia.edu/9226456/Early_Indian_Mahayana_Buddhism_I_Recent_scholarship
(2010b). Early Indian Mahāyāna Buddhism II: New Perspectives. Religion Compass 4/2: 66-74. DOI:10.1111/j.1749-8171.2009.00193.x https://www.academia.edu/9226471/Early_Indian_Mahayana_Buddhism_II_New_perspectives

Seishi KARASHIMA

(2013) Was the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Compiled in Gandhāra in Gāndhārī. ARIRIAB XVI: 171-188. https://www.academia.edu/9211788/Was_the_Aṣṭasāhasrikā_Prajñāpāramitā_Compiled_in_Gandhāra_in_Gāndhārī
(2015a) Who Composed the Mahāyāna Scriptures? ––– The Mahāsāṃghikas and Vaitulya Scriptures. ARIRIAB XVIII: 113–162. https://www.academia.edu/12854001/Who_Composed_the_Mahāyāna_Scriptures_The_Mahāsāṃghikas_and_Vaitulya_Scriptures
(2015b) Vehicle (yāna) and Wisdom (jñāna) in the Lotus Sutra: the Origin of the Notion of Yāna in Mahāyāna Buddhism. ARIRIAB XVIII: 163-196. https://www.academia.edu/12854029/Vehicle_yāna_and_Wisdom_jñāna_in_the_Lotus_Sutra_the_Origin_of_the_Notion_of_yāna_in_Mahāyāna_Buddhism

Schopen, Gregory. (2005) Figments and Fragments of Mahayana Buddhism in India. University of Hawai'i Press. http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/books/schopen-figments-chap1.pdf

See also Bhikkhu Bodhi et al., The Bodhisattva Ideal: Essays on the Emergence of Mahāyāna.
Buddhist Publication Society, Kandy, 2013. [Reviewed by Dhīvan in the Western Buddhist Review. And seems to make many of the same points from a mostly Theravāda point of view.]

Zaraθuštra
the first aθauruuan

In this essay I look for possible connections between the Sanskrit Atharvans (Pāḷi ātabbaṇa) and the Iranian aθauruuan or āθravan. The few references to ātabbaṇa in Pāḷi, in the Suttanipāta and its (Canonical) commentaries, portray them has hostile wizards and trouble makers. This is in stark contrast to how Vedic texts saw them, and of course Brahmins adopted Atharva text as an honorary Veda by about 300 BCE. The Iranian aθauruuan is a Zoroastrian missionary who spends time travelling, teaching about the religion, and making converts.

It's fairly well known that the Buddhist texts make repeated reference to the three Vedas. The Tevijjā Sutta (DN 13) is the one text that gives us some sense of which Vedas might have been around in the early Buddhist milieu. It lists different kinds of Brahmins who teach different paths: “Various Brahmins—addhariya, tittiriya, chandoka, and bavhārijjha Brahmins—all teach a way out for one seeking merger with Brahmā.” (D i.238). Jayatilleke (1963) shows that these names correspond to the Sanskrit: adhvaryus, taittirīya, chāndogya, and bahvṛca. These are in turn associated with Śatapatha, Taittirīya, Chāndogya, and Bahvṛca Brāhmaṇa texts respectively. The Bahvṛca Brāhmaṇa is now lost, but appears to have been related to the Aitareya and Kauṣītaki Brāhmaṇas. These four Brāhmaṇa texts in turn are associated with the White Yajurveda, the Black Yajurveda, the Sāmaveda, and the Ṛgveda. (Jayatilleke 1963: 479-480).

Originally only three vedas were canonical. For instance in the Sela Sutta (MN 92), the Brahmin Sela is said to be “well versed in the three vedas”. This is a pericope, or stock formula for describing a ‘good Brahmin’, which occurs many places. Julius Lipner (1994) suggests that by about 400-300 BCE the Atharvaveda had been included in the Vedic canon to make the traditional four vedas. Even earlier, both Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad and Chāndogya Upaniṣad (ca. 800-600 BCE) have a more tolerant attitude to the Atharvaveda than do the Pāli texts. At CU 7.1 the “atharvan” is included amongst the Vedas, and at BU 2.4.10 & 4.5.11 the mantras of the Atharvans and Aṅgirases are included in a list of things to be learned, though not labelled ‘veda’. In Signe Cohen's account of the internecine conflicts between Brahmanical groups, BU represents the more progressive faction, living well east of the Kurukṣetra (in the region of Kosala) and championing the authority of the Yajurveda; whereas CU represents a more conservative faction, living within the Kurukṣetra and retaining the authority of the Ṛgveda (Cohen 2008).

Despite drawing on the Ṛgveda, the Atharvaveda represents a different tradition, one which would eventually have an influence on the lifting of mantra out of the sacrificial ritual context so that they could be applied in the mundane, day to day context. The Gṛhya Sūtras, which came much later, are concerned with precisely this application of mantras to the household life, and also made them accessible, in theory at least, to all strata of society, even the śudras, lowest rank of the four classes or varṇa. Lipner refers to the Atharvaveda as :

“Earthy verse-spells for the protection against life’s problems (fevers and sicknesses, enemies, sorcery, snake bites, bad dreams, and so on), and for bringing something about (e.g. the good will of others, victory in battle, success in love, healthy cattle, good crops and rain, virility, and power in society); it also contains hymns of homage to gods.” Lipner p.33

“Verse-spells” are mantras of course, used as magical spells, and in the Atharvaveda about one quarter of the verses are taken from the Ṛgveda. Lipner suggests that the spells of the Atharvaveda are popular right up to the present. That the Atharvaveda contains a large number of passages recycled from the Ṛgveda is further puzzling. The Atharvans seem to have been outsiders in the eyes of both śrāmaṇas and brāhamaṇas, though view more favourably by the latter and with access to sacred texts theoretically known only to the latter.

There are a number of protective verses or paritta in the early Buddhist scriptures, texts which are intended to be chanted to gain protection from malign influences. For example the Karaṇīya Metta Sutta or the Āṭānāṭiya Sutta (See also Piyadassi 1999). There is an apparent similarity of purpose between the Atharvaveda mantras and the paritta texts – especially when they are used as magical protection from harm and misfortune.

Buddhists and the Atharvaveda

In the Tuvaṭaka Sutta, of the Suttanipatta 927

Āthabbaṇaṃ supinaṃ lakkhaṇaṃ, no vidahe athopi nakkhattaṃ;
Virutañca gabbhakaraṇaṃ, tikicchaṃ māmako na seveyya.

Not practising spells, oneiromancy, or even astrology
One of mine would not divine animal sounds, do fertility magic, or healing.

"One of mine" is a reference to a Buddhist follower. The Pāli word I'm translating as "spells" is āthabbaṇa. The athabba part is the Pāli equivalent of the name of the Sanskrit atharva. With the addition of the -ana suffix (and vṛddhi of the first vowel) we get the derivative āthabbaṇa meaning 'connected with the atharva'. Monier-Williams records atharvaṇa as a name of Śiva, but doesn't provide a context. According to the Paramatthajotikā commentary, from a slightly later period:

Āthabbaṇanti āthabbaṇikamantappayogaṃ (Pj 2.564)

Āthabbaṇa here means one who engages (payoga) in the spells (manta) of the Atharvans.

The Mahāniddessa commentary (Nidd I 2.381) expands further on this theme

Āthabbaṇikā āthabbaṇaṃ payojenti, nagare vā ruddhe saṅgāme vā paccupaṭṭhite parasenapaccatthikesu paccāmittesu ītiṃ uppādenti, upaddavaṃ uppādenti, rogaṃ uppādenti, pajjarakaṃ karonti, sūlaṃ karonti, visūcikaṃ karonti, pakkhandikaṃ karonti.

The Atharvans are those who practice the Atharva; they cause disturbances in towns; they cause calamity amongst hostile armies, opposing armies, and other adversaries; they cause misfortune and disease; they cause illness, pain, cholera (?), and dysentery.

Now Monier-Williams (sv atharvan) described the Atharvaveda as "consisting chiefly of formulas and spells intended to counteract diseases and calamities." Which is the opposite of the early Buddhist description. So the early texts and the canonical commentaries (which are earlier than Buddhaghosa) have a very dim view of the Arthavans. Moriz Winternitz (1927) links the Atharvans with the Aṅgiras, who were also priests in a fire worshipping cult (cf. BU 2.4.10 & 4.5.11 as above). He suggests that the former were interested in healing magic, while the latter were focussed on magic that could harm. The Bṛghus were another group of priests mentioned in the Ṛgveda. We see therefore that there were a variety of Brahmin, or Brahmin related, groups in contact with the early Buddhist milieu.

In this light we might think again of the Kassapa brothers of Gaya (Vin i.23ff; you can read a translation here). They were fire worshippers, but clearly not of the Brahmin variety, because, for example, they have a fire worship house (agyāgāre), where Brahmins did their rituals outside on temporary alters constructed for the purpose. The Kassapas are described as matted-hair ascetics (jaṭila). The Buddha performs a number of miracles and magical feats that convince to them to convert and throw away their fire worshipping paraphernalia. The Buddha then preaches the famous Fire Sermon.

I often wonder how much the survival of texts has influenced our views of the history of this period. Only Buddhist and Brahmin texts survive from the this period in India. Only Brahmin texts from before it. And yet clearly there were other groups around at the time. Other perspectives. It's just that they left no record. It's easy to forget that we only have a very narrow and biased view of these times. Early Buddhists had no commitment to accurately present the historical circumstances or other points of view. They were very often concerned with self-justification.

One of the constant refrains of the Buddha is that the traditional beliefs are not efficacious. In Dhammapada we find the Buddha saying:

Bahuṃ ve saraṇaṃ yanti, pabbatāni vanāni ca;
Ārāmarukkhacetyāni, manussā bhayatajjitā. | 188 |

Netaṃ kho saraṇaṃ khemaṃ, netaṃ saraṇamuttamaṃ;
Netaṃ saraṇamāgamma, sabbadukkhā pamuccati. | 189 |

People driven by fear seek a great refuge,
A mountain, forest, temple, tree, or shrine.

This is not a safe refuge, not the ultimate refuge
Going to this refuge one is not released from all disappointment

Despite the modern rhetoric of tolerance, Buddhists texts are full of expressive denunciations of what they consider wrong views. At times these polemics cross over into apparent irritation and vexation. The Atharvans were seen in a very negative light.

The Atharvaveda associates misfortunes with the Vedic gods, and protection against misfortune is achieved by appealing to the gods, especially Agni, Varuṇa, and Indra. However it is not entirely clear what the difference is between this and, say, the Āṭānāṭiya Sutta where one is appealing to the power of yakkhas and other daemonic spirits; or, say, the Sambula Jātaka where Sambula is rescued from a malicious yakkha by Indra. Buddhists were not always averse to invoking gods and demons to aid them in difficult times. There is an apparent paradox here: the early Buddhist texts both ridicule the Vedic or autochthonic gods, and also at times call on them for aid. So the antipathy to the Atharvaveda could be part of a struggle going on between traditional beliefs and the new dispensation of the Buddha.

The one thing that Buddhist texts do not do is lump the Atharvans in with Brahmins. At least they don't see the Atharvaveda aligned with the Ṛgveda, the Sāmaveda, and the Yajurveda. Thus there is a real question about the identity of the Atharvans. And at this point that we turn to ancient Iranian literature to see if it sheds any light.

The aθauruuan: Priest and Proselytiser.

As I mentioned in my introduction the Sanskrit word arthavan has a counterpart in Old-Iranian aθauruuan or āθravan.† It is apparent that both Sanskrit and Iranian words continue an Indo-Iranian form *atharuan 'provided with athar' (compare the -van possessive suffix in Sanskrit), however authorities do not agree what athar might be (see Hintze 2009: 179, n.28 for a discussion of this).

† θ is pronounced like the th in 'theory'. The former spelling is used by Hintze, the latter by Boyce, but they appear to be discussing the same phenomenon.

Although the priest is often connected with fire worship Boyce argues that "The evidence points rather to fire having acquired such importance later, in India through the part played by fire (agni-) in the cult, in Iran through Zoroaster’s reform." By "later" she means ca. 4th century BC. It seems that the aθauruuan were the missionary wing of Zoroastrianism:

"The oldest attestation of the word āθravan is in the Yasna Haptaŋhāiti, where the worshippers honor “the return of the priests who go afar (to those who) seek righteousness in other lands,” that is, it seems to āθravans acting as Zoroastrian missionaries (Y. 42.6)." (Boyce)

According to the Avestan text, Hērbedestān, there was a tradition of each (extended) family allowing (or perhaps requiring) one person to leave home for "priestly service" (Hintze 2015: 38, 2009: 172). Both males and female could undertake this duty. They would study and then preach what we now call Zoroastrianism, the Mazdayasnian religion, and perform the rituals of the religion. Hērbedestān says that they ought to be able to return home three times per year, and not more that three nights of travelling (2009: 176). Zoroaster (i.e. Zaraθuštra) is described as the first priest (paoiryāi aθaurune), the first warrior and the first herdsman. That Zoroastrianism was an evangelical religion is suggested by references to spreading to other countries:

"From here then / the good, Mazdā-Worshipping religion / will spread over all seven regions." (Hintze 2009: 177)

"We worship the return of the priests / who will have gone far away to the truth-seekers of the countries." (Hintze 2009: 178)

So the aθauruuan was a missionary, though the Hērbedestān appears to be ambivalent about how far they might have spread Zoroastrianism: far, but not too far. Hintze interprets these passages as suggesting that the selected aθauruuans would travel to a community and convert it. Then that community would in turn contribute missionaries to spread Zoroastrianism in a domino effect (2015: 38). As Boyce observes "In due course, by their endeavors, Zoroastrianism, first established in eastern Iran, reached western Iran also, to be adopted there by the hereditary priests of the Medes and the Persians, known to the Greco-Roman world as the “magi.”"

Conclusions

From this information we do not have enough information to form a definite conclusion, but if we assume that the name Atharvan was relatively stable then we may conjecture a relationship between the Iranian aθauruuan and the Indian Atharvan. Most likely the word is used in its general sense of 'priest' and we know little about the function of such priests in India.

There is a slight possibility that the missionary activity of the aθauruuan took them across the Hindukush and into India. We do know that the Achaemanid Persian Empire had political influence in the Indus Valley. We know that cultural contacts with Iran were significant. For example, writing was introduced into India from Iran (in the form of the Aramaic script that Persian Administrators adopted after they conquered that part of the Middle-East). The Sanskrit words for writing and book, lipi and pustaka, are loan words from Old-Iranian. And so on.

The main problem of course is that the Sanskrit Atharvans are not Zoroastrians or anything like it. They are magicians who use spells to protect or harm. So perhaps the simplest answer is that there is no relationship except that an old-Indo-Iranian label for a priest was recycled. Against this is the fact that on the Indian side of the border, the name of a group of priests seems to be more than a general label and to refer to a distinct cultural group: the Atharvans, the Aṅgirasas, the Bṛgus, all seem to have coherent groups which at the time probably meant being kin based. In this they contrasted with the sāmaṇas who had begun to form groups based on loyalty to a religious teacher.

In my work on the Iranian origins of the Śākyas (Attwood 2012) one of the stand out features was that though they has originated form Iran and had perhaps been Zoroastrian, by the time they settle on the Himalayan foothills on the margins of the Kingdom of Kosala, the Śākyas seem to have adopted an Indian language and forgotten most of their history. Only a few glimpse of Iran are possible. Indeed the few facts presented are probably not decisive enough to convince most people, though my sense is that taken together they are difficult to explain any other way. So if the Śākyas end up in Kosala having become thoroughly Indianised, then perhaps something similar happened to the Atharvans?

The Atharvans have adapted chunks of the Ṛgveda into their religious spiel. There are only two possible explanations for this. They might have come from Vedic speaking Brahmins who memorised the verses and perhaps converted to the religion of the Atharvans. Or the verses in question pre-date either the Ṛgveda or the Atharvaveda and were the common cultural property of Vedic speaking Indians who were divided into distinct groups. We see a similar process at work in the different collections of the Dharmapada for example. Some of the verses of the Dhp are also found in Jain texts and in the Sanskrit Epics. Although exclusivity was a feature of the mature Brahmanical sacrificial religion, it may be that some parts of the Ṛgveda reflect an earlier phase which was less exclusive.

In any case, from the point of view of the early Buddhists, the Atharvans were a distinct group from the Brahmins and seem to have been viewed with fear and loathing. Whereas Brahmins are sometimes mocked, they are also sometimes seen in a very positive light and many of them convert to Buddhism, the few mentions of the Atharvans are all negative. Although the name has an obvious link to Iran, there is not enough evidence to make any stronger link. Still it is an intriguing possibility, and my feeling is that the interactions between Iran, especially the Achaemanid Empire, and Pre-Asoka India have had too little attention to date and will most likely repay careful attention with new discoveries.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Attwood, Jayarava. (2012) Possible Iranian Origins for Sākyas and Aspects of Buddhism. Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies. 3. http://www.ocbs.org/ojs/index.php/jocbs/article/view/26

Boyce, M. (1987) Āθravan. Encyclopædia Iranica, online edition, New York, 1996-. Vol. III, Fasc. 1, pp. 16-17. http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/atravan-priest.

Cohen, Signe. (2008) Text and Authority in The Older Upaniṣads. Leiden: Brill.

Hintze, Almut. (2009) Disseminating the Mazdayasnian Religion. An Edition of the Avestan Hērbedestān Chapter 5*. Exegisti monumenta. Festschrift in Honour of Nicholas Sims-Williams. Edited by Werner Sundermann, Almut Hintze and François de BloisHarrassowitz Verlag, 251-278.

Hintze, Almut. (2015) Zarathustra’s Time and Homeland: Linguistic Perspectives. In: M. Stausberg and Y. Vevaina (eds.), The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Zoroastrianism. With the assistance of Anna Tessmann. Oxford: OUP, 31–38.

Jayatilleke, K. N. 1963. Early Buddhist Theory of Knowledge. George Allen and Unwin.

Lipner, J. (1994) Hindus: their religious beliefs and practices. London : Routledge.

Piyadassi. (1975) The Book of Protection: Paritta. Buddhist Publication Society. Online: Access to Insight (1999)

Winternitz, Moriz (1927) A History of Indian Literature, Vol. 1. Motilal Banarsidass, 1996

I was trying to have a discussion with someone about the Heart Sutra and it became apparent that as far as they were concerned the Sutra consisted only of the phrase "form is emptiness". I realised that I've avoided saying much about this part of the text. It's the part that most people are focussed on, though to me there are other more interesting facets of the content of the text, not least of which is its fascinating history. It seemed that the time had come for me to overcome my reluctance and to tackle this enigmatic passage and see what I can make of it.

This is as much a methodological problem as it is an exegetic challenge. I feel no obligation to take the tradition on its own terms, therefore I don't feel bound to do what most Buddhist commentators do, which is to reproduce what has been said before whether it makes sense or not. In fact in the case of the Heart Sutra this typically Buddhist procedure is particularly unsatisfactory, partly because the text itself is problematic in ways that previous Buddhist commentators have almost without exception failed to notice, and partly because what has been traditionally said is more related to sectarian views than to the text itself, and finally because what is said very often does not make sense. I want to try to avoid the "Guru Effect", the assumption that because we fail to understand what an intellectual says, that it must be profound (Sperber 2010). It seems clear to me that Buddhism suffers from this to a high degree, especially when it comes to Prajñāpāramitā texts. A great deal of obscurantist nonsense has been written about the Heart Sutra.

Despite the fact that the passage in question is short, just 16 characters in Chinese, the methods I adopt in working with this text require many steps and the method itself is (I hope) of as much interest as the outcome. Weakness in method plagues commentaries on the Heart Sutra. For example commentators were prevented from seeing the simple grammatical error outlined in my JOCBS article Heart Murmurs (2015). They failed to parse the sentence properly. As popular as this text it, it seems to suffer from neglect born of complacency. If one person overlooks a grammatical error one time, that is one thing. When every highly trained scholar and passionate Buddhist overlooked it for a period of 60 years during which time the text received daily attention, then we have reason to distrust the whole enterprise.

My approach means that the essay is long by necessity and I will present it in two halves to make it less daunting for the reader. Eventually this material will be incorporated into my book on the Heart Sutra.

At the outset I assume that the Heart Sutra is a Prajñāpāramitā text, not a Madhyamaka, Yogācāra, or Tathāgatagarbha, or Tantric text. Those other points of view are, at best, secondary to the task of understanding the Heart Sutra. This passage, like much of the text is a quotation from the Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā-prajñāpāramitā-sūtra. So, although it spoke to the 7th century Chinese monk who copied some lines from the Pañcaviṃśati and framed thereby creating the Heart Sutra, and although these words have appealed to the various sectarian audiences over time (including the present), the words of the Heart Sutra ought first and foremost to be understood as an expression of Prajñāpāramitā thought from the early first millennium CE in North-West India. An approach that to my knowledge has never been tried.

I also assume that the Buddhists who wrote the early Prajñāpāramitā texts were still working within the domain of experience and were opposed to ontological speculation. Thus I see a continuity between these "Mahāyāna" texts and early Buddhist texts like the Kaccanagotta Sutta and the Sabba Sutta, which emphasise that the domain of application of Buddhist ideas is human experience. I find that this assumption is productive of more interesting and coherent readings of these apparently enigmatic texts.

The first step is to establish the text. This is particularly difficult with the Heart Sutra because the various Sanskrit editions contain errors, the manuscript/epigraphical tradition is rife with errors, the extant Chinese versions are different from each other and from the Sanskrit. Establishing the text in this case also involves comparison with relevant passages in the extant texts Pañcaviṃśati (in our case through both editions and manuscripts). A further difficulty is that all of these texts continued to grow in India, so that each subsequent Chinese translation is longer than the previous ones. Deciding which of the many versions is authoritative is reduced to a more or less arbitrary decision.

Having decided which text we are commenting on, we can begin to try to understand it. In order to do this I will, in Part II, turn initially to the traditional commentaries from India, China and Japan. However these offer very little insight into the text because as already stated they are simply sectarian monologues treating the Heart Sutra as a tabula rasa for other ideas. And this is not the same as commenting on the text.

So instead of relying on traditional sectarian commentaries, I will make a methodological leap and employ the Aṣṭasāhasrikā-prajñāpāramitā-sūtra as a commentary. Aṣṭa is the source text of the Prajñāpāramitā tradition and thus what it says on the subject ought to be both authentic and authoritative (taking into account that Aṣṭa itself is something of a moveable feast that changes over time). This approach poses a challenge to the idea that the Heart Sutra conveys the essence of Prajñāpāramitā. I raise the possibility that the flip side of "form is emptiness" might simply be a hyper-correction by an over-zealous early editor. Finally I reflect on some implications of this study, and my hermeneutic approach generally, for practising Buddhists. As usual all translations are my own, unless otherwise specified.

I hope a fresh approach to reading this all too familiar text will produce a new appreciation for the Heart Sutra and reinvigorate interest in the kind of practice it represents.

Establishing the text.

Our first task will be to look at the text and try to settle on a version to comment on. Another starting assumption is that the text was composed in Chinese based on selections from Kumārajīva's Large Perfection of Wisdom text 《摩訶般若波羅蜜經》= Mahāprajñāpāramitā Sūtra (T223; translated ca. 404 CE), which is a translation of the Pañcaviṃśati. The section beginning "form is emptiness" is definitely drawn from that text. We'll first locate this passage in the Sanskrit manuscript tradition. I no longer trust Conze's edition, though I use his notation for identifying the manuscripts, see his 1967 version of the edition for a key. So from the manuscripts I have personally transcribed, or that are published as individual transcriptions, we see the following variations:

Nb rūpaṃ śunyaṃ śunyataiva rūpaṃ na rūpān pṛthak śunyatā na śunyatā pṛthak rūpaṃ ||
Ne rupaṃ śuyaṃ śunyataiva rupaṃ . rupān. pṛthak . śunyatāyāṃ . pṛthak śunyatāyāṃ . pṛthak . śunyaṃ ||
Nh rupa śuṇyā śunyataiva rupaṃ rupā {pṛ}tha{k} nā śunyatāyāṃ pṛthak sunye
Nk rūpaṃ śunyaṃ śunyataiva rūpaṃ | na rūpāt pṛthak śunyatā | śunyatāyā na pṛtha(k) rūpaṃ
Ja iha śāriputra rūpaṃ śūnyatā śūnyataiva rūpaṃ rūpān na pṛthak śūnyatāyā na pṛthag rūpaṃ yad rūpaṃ sā śūnyatāyā śūnyatā tad rūpaṃ
Jb rūpa śūnyatā śūnyataiva rūpam | rūpān na pṛthak śūnyatā śūnyatāyā na pṛthag rūpam | yad rūpaṃ sā śūnyatā yā śūnyatā tad rūpam |
Cc iha sāriputra rūpaṃ śūnyatā [śu]nyataiva [na pṛ]tha[k] rūpa [śū]nya[tāyā na pṛthag rūpaṃ]
Ce rūpam eva śūnyatā śūnyataiva rūpaṃ || na rūpaṃ pṛthak śunyatāyāḥ nāpi śūnyatā pṛthagrūpāt ||
Cg iti hi rūpaṃ śunyatā śūnyateva rūpaṃ rūpaṃ te pṛk śunyatā śūnyatāyā pṛthaka rūpaṃ yat rūpaṃnta śunyatā śunyateva sa rūpaṃ

From this we might suppose that the first Sanskrit translation of the Heart Sutra probably read:

iha śāriputra rūpaṃ śūnyatā śūnyataiva rūpaṃ rūpān na pṛthak śūnyatā śūnyatāyā na pṛthag rūpam

Although many mss., including Ja which is the oldest extant ms., add yad rūpaṃ sā śūnyatāyā śūnyatā tad rūpaṃ, we have reason to believe, from comparison with the Chinese canonical texts and Pañcaviṃśati that this phrase was added sometime later (see also Nattier 1992: 201, n.5a; 204 n.19). Conze decided to include the phrase in his critical edition, but does not discuss the reasons.

Only a minority of manuscripts address this passage to Śāriputra, which leaves us in some doubt about whether to include iha śāriputra at this point. The Chinese texts both include an equivalent phrase and each Pañcaviṃśati witness has some form of address to Śāriputra. So it was probably meant to be there, but the form of the address varies significantly.

The Chinese texts

There are three versions of the short text Heart Sutra in the Chinese Tripiṭaka, of which we will focus on two since the third (T256) is relatively late:

T250 摩訶般若波羅蜜大明呪經 = *Mahāprajñāpārami[tā]-mahāvidyā-sūtra.

T251 般若波羅蜜多心經 = Prajñāpāramitā-hṛdaya-sūtra

Note that T250, ostensibly from two centuries earlier, doesn't call this text the Heart Sutra (心經) at all, but opts for Mahāvidyā Sūtra (大明呪經). There is quite a bit that could be said about this, it's arguably a much better title for the text, but this will have to wait for another essay. Please also see Chinese Heart Sutra: Dates and Attributions. The relevant passages read:

T250: 舍利弗！非色異空，非空異色。色即是空，空即是色 (8.847c13-14)

T251: 舍利子: 色不異空，空不異色；色即是空，空即是色。(8.848c08-9)

I won't translate for now, but even with understanding we can see that they use much the same characters with minor variations (非 and 不 are both negating characters with slight different functions; 是 = 'is', verb 'to be'; 色= rūpa; 空 = śūnyatā). We understand that these are quotations from Kumārajīva's translation of the Pañcaviṃśati, T223, and a direct comparison shows that T251 is almost identical with T223, except for how the name Śāriputra is written.

T223 舍利弗！色不異空、空不異色，色即是空、空即是色，(8.223a13-4)

However, Huifeng (2008) points out that the Taishō edition footnotes record that in the earlier Sòng, Yuán, Míng and Gōng editions of the Tripiṭaka, T223 reads 非色異空，非空異色 for 色不異空、空不異色. (See also Variations in the Heart Sutra in Chinese). So in fact we can read T250 and T223 as being identical at this point, making T251 the odd one out.

Nattier's thesis additionally floats the possibility that T250 might have been edited to conform to T1509 《大智度論》Dàzhìdùlùn (*Mahāprajñāpāramitopadeśa?), a commentary on Pañcaviṃśati incorporating the text and attributed to Nāgārjuna, also translated by Kumārajīva in the early 5th century. Or that the text was originally taken directly from T1509 and T251 has been edited to conform to Xuánzàng's style in T220-ii《大般若波羅蜜多經》(Vol. 7, Fasc. 401-478).

T 1509 非色異空，非空異色，色即是空，空即是色；(25.327c22-23)

T220-ii 舍利子！色不異空，空不異色，色即是空，空即是色 (7.14a11-12)

Given that Kumārajīva worked roughly two centuries before Xuánzàng we might assume that T223/T1509/T250 show the original wording. So we will assume that T251 took its final form relatively late, probably as a result of editing by Xuánzàng's students and take the Chinese text to follow T250:

非色異空，非空異色，色即是空，空即是色

This runs counter to the usual procedure of those who comment on the Heart Sutra, which almost always privileges the version attributed to Xuánzàng, i.e. T251. In my view, neither T250 nor T251 can be the ur-text or the source text for the Sanskrit translation. There are just too many discrepancies between Chinese and Sanskrit. Thus some work is required to establish an ur-text in Chinese through a detailed comparison of T250, T251, T223, T1509, and the Sanskrit text, along with comparisons with other translations by Kumārajīva to locate all the parallels.

Now we turn our attention to the next important reference point, the Sanskrit precursors.

Sanskrit Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra.

There are two modern editions of the Sanskrit Pañcaviṃśati, Dutt (1934) and Kimura (2010), though the latter is apparently a revision of the former based on the same Sanskrit manuscript. The Gilgit manuscript has been published in facsimile, but not yet edited or transliterated except in part by Stefano Zacchetti (fols. 1-27) and Yoke Meei Choong (fols. 202-205). A small extract with just the Heart Sutra material is also found in Nattier (1992: 161-3) and Tanahashi (2014: 205-6) and all three are slightly different! Tanahashi cites the initial transcription by Greg Schopen revised by Paul Harrison for the book, but gives no publication details. Nattier (204, n.15) credits her transcription to Schopen (unpublished), so presumably this is also the source for Tanahashi. Nattier's text is an uncorrected transcription with notes (1992: 204-5, n.s 15-26) recording record some scribal errors and variants; Zacchetti's edition has corrected scribal errors and the online version does not include any notes; whereas Tanahashi has included scribal errors with comments linearly in curly brackets in his text, and eschews any notes. The Gilgit ms. is dated to the 6th century and seems to be very like Kumārajīva's T223 and must correspond closely to the Sanskrit text he translated. Thus we would have a strong preference for using the Gilgit ms. over the later versions in this study. Fortunately the passage concerned is in the Zacchetti extract.

tathā hi śāriputra nānyad rūpam anyā śūnyatā, nānyā śūnyatā anyad rūpaṃ, rūpam eva śūnyatā śūnyataiva rūpam, (Kimura 2010: 1-1, 64)

na hi śāradvatīputrānyad rūpam anyā śunyatā nānyā śunyatānyad rūpam rūpam eva śunyatā śunyataiva rūpam (Zacchetti 2005: 21v)

There are minor differences here. The most obvious being that Śāriputra is addressed as Śāradvatīputra. This seems to be based on a tradition that his mother was called Śāradvatī. In the Pāḷi tradition Sāriputta's mother's name is Rūpasārī. Other variations on his name in Sanskrit texts include Sāriputra, Sāliputra, Sārisuta, Sāradvatīputra, Sārisambhava. The confusion of r/l is a dialectical variation. other variations could be artefacts of the translation of oral texts from Prakrit to Sanskrit. See also Nattier 1992: 204, n.16). Most of the other differences, especially at the beginning are the result of sandhi: na anyā > nānyā; śāradvatīputra anyad > śāradvatīputrānyad.

However, the two versions are similar enough to establish the text addressed to Śāriputra:

na hi śariputra anyad rūpam anyā śūnyatā nānyā śūnyatā anyad rūpaṃ rūpam eva śūnyatā śūnyataiva rūpam.

Although the name Śāriputra is invoked at this point, it does not help to clarify in what way. Neither version uses the iha 'here' idiom, but both use the particle hi'for' to make it clear that what follows relates to what has just been said. So if the particles were not missing entirely in Chinese we could say that iha was a back translation for hi. Since the way Śāriputra's name is invoked is at best secondary to the problem of understanding the passage we'll leave it off for the purposes of comparison.

The Text

Now we can see the passage in it's journey from India to China and back, and note that this was one of the examples used by Nattier in establishing her Chinese Origins hypothesis (1992: 164). Our passage is a series of four statements

Pañcaviṃśati →	T250 →	Hṛdaya
nānyad rūpam anyā śūnyatā nānyā śūnyatā anyad rūpaṃ rūpam eva śūnyatā śūnyataiva rūpam	非色異空非空異色色即是空空即是色	rūpaṃ śūnyatā śūnyataiva rūpaṃ rūpān na pṛthak śūnyatā śūnyatāyā na pṛthag rūpam
Form is not one thing and emptiness another (anyad). Emptiness is not one thing, and form another. Form is just emptiness. Emptiness is just form.	It is not the case that form is different from emptiness. It is not the case that emptiness is different from form. Form just is emptiness. Emptiness just is form.	Form is emptiness. Emptiness is just form. Form is not different from (pṛthak) emptiness. Emptiness is not different from form.

We might also have looked at the short texts in Tibetan discovered at Dunhuang, but my ability to analyse Tibetan is very limited. Nattier mentions a preliminary study that has not been completed, though see notes in Attwood (2015: 39-40). It seems likely that the Dunhuang Tibetan short text is a translation from the Chinese.

As per Nattier's (1992) comparison we can see that the Heart Sutra is a paraphrase of Pañcaviṃśati:

na anya X anya Y = X na pṛthak Y

The Chinese texts by contrast are all more or less identical with T250. Note also that semantically there is no distinction in Sanskrit between saying nānyad rūpam anyā śūnyatā and saying rūpam eva śūnyatā. On one hand we are saying that form and emptiness are not different, and on the other we are saying that they are the same. It amounts to the same thing. Rather than adding anything new, we can see the second statement as emphasising the statement, with redundancy typical of Buddhist texts. Although Buddhist exegetes often see this kind of repetitious reinforcement as an opportunity to add more comments, this is unnecessary.

The simplest way to account for the texts as we find them is Nattier's Chinese Origins hypothesis: a text reading nānyad rūpam anyā śūnyatā, was transmitted to China where it was translated (T223) as 非色異空 and then this Chinese phrase was quoted in the Chinese Heart Sutra. When the Heart Sutra was translated back into Sanskrit it became rūpān na pṛthak śūnyatā. In other essays on the Heart Sutra I have observed that other features of the text suggest that the person who translated the text from Chinese into Sanskrit was a native Chinese speaker and unfamiliar with the Sanskrit conventions of the Prajñāpāramitā literature, and thus chose unconventional Sanskrit phrasing in several places.

Another difference is the inversion of the two halves of the passage in Sanskrit Hṛdaya, despite the agreement of Pañcaviṃśati and the Chinese Hṛdaya (both versions). Since the Chinese Heart Sutra has these the right way around, the change seems to have occurred in the translation back into Sanskrit. But there's no way to tell why.

Some Sanskrit manuscripts and all of the Indian commentaries preserved in Tibetan (Lopez 1996: 5, n.2) have rūpaṃ śūnyaṃ rather than rūpaṃ śūnyatā, which may be a scribal error or related to the fact śūnya and śūnyatā are both indicated by 空 in Chinese. Comparison with the Sanskrit Pañcaviṃśati shows that śūnyatā was intended.

Summary

This is the kind of process that one must carry out to work seriously with the Heart Sutra, a process one does not find in modern translations and commentaries. A initial grasp of the history of the text allows us to locate the relevant information and to see that our text undergoes a series of changes over time. Indeed how we see the text depends on what our reference point in time is.

All previous commentators, except for Jan Nattier, have simply taken the textual tradition on face value. The Sanskrit version is the one reconstructed by Conze, the official Chinese one is T251 (attributed to Xuánzàng), and the Pañcaviṃśatisāharikā-prajñāpāramitā-sūtra is largely ignored, even when it is cited. A partial exception is the recent guide to the Heart Sutra by Kazuaki Tanahashi (2014). This is by far the best of the modern, Zen inspired, commentaries, but is still weak on Sanskrit semantics, grammar and morphology. Tanahashi does at least give lip service to the role of the earlier Sanskrit Prajñāpāramitā tradition, but he does not allow it to have any authority in understanding the text, whereas I argue that one cannot study the text without giving due attention to the Pañcaviṃśati in both Sanskrit and Chinese. Tanahashi also overloads his book with irrelevant versions in multiple languages drowning out important information with trivia. He is resistant to some of Nattier's revisions of the attribution and dating of the Chinese versions, insisting that T250 is the ur-text, "the α version", when plainly it cannot be. At least it is not the version from which the Sanskrit text was translated.

The history of this text makes establishing the text to be commented a complex task. When we take everything into account it introduces a note of ambiguity into the proceedings, and not the kind that Buddhists like. What it does is undermine the idea that any one text is the authentic Heart Sutra. It's likely that from now on we'll always have to work with multiple versions: a reconstructed first Sanskrit translation, now partially obscured by the copying tradition, which introduces a number of changes and errors at different times and places; a first Chinese version, now lost and as yet unreconstructed (largely because of resistance to Nattier's thesis); a series of precursor texts in Chinese (particularly T223/T1509, T387, and T410) that are translations of Sanskrit texts, most of which have extant versions; and in the case of the 25,000 line Prajñāpāramitā, the 8,000 line text that predates and underlies it. On top of this is the fact that all the Prajñāpāramitā texts continued to evolve over time, independently and as different rates. So how we understand the Heart Sutra depends in large part on our reference point. All existing commentaries also take an external reference point, usually in the form of a sectarian ideology.

Buddhists often tell me that they feel they can approach the essential meaning of a text by reading multiple translations. Except that in this case, all of the translators are repeating the same mistakes and none of them is showing enough of their working for a naive reader to see what those mistakes are. For example as far as the popular translations and commentaries of the Sanskrit text are concerned it's clear that none is a reliable guide to the text, and none is sufficiently well versed in the early Prajñāpāramitā to put the text into its context. The Chinese text is better understood, since many of the commentators are at least competent in modern Chinese, but it gets slotted into the context that suits the ideology of the translator. The implications of Nattier's landmark 1992 article have yet to be fully appreciated - her article is long and complex, with a great deal of information tucked away in the many and voluminous footnotes.

Having established the text that we aim to study, in Part II we will briefly turn to the traditional commentaries, before attempting another approach, using the Aṣṭasāhasrikā as a commentary.

Bibliography

Chinese Texts from the CBETA version of the Taishō. http://www.cbeta.org

Sanskrit texts from Göttingen Register of Electronic Texts in Indian Languages (Gretil) http://gretil.sub.uni-goettingen.de/

______________________________________

Attwood, Jayarava (2015). Heart Murmurs: Some Problems with Conze’s Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya. Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies. 8: 28-48.

Conze, Edward. (1967) ‘The Prajñāpāramitā-Hṛdaya Sūtra’ in Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies: Selected Essays, Bruno Cassirer, pp. 147-167. [revised version of Conze (1948).]

Hamilton, Sue. (2000) Early Buddhism: A New Approach. London: Routledge.

Huifeng [aka Orsborn, M. B.] (2008) A Survey Of Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra Translations In Chinese. Online: http://prajnacara.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/survey-of-prajnaparamita-sutra.html.

Hyun Choo, B. (2006) 'An English Translation of the Banya paramilda simgyeong chan: Wonch'uk's Commentary on the Heart Sūtra (Prajñāpāramitā-hṛdaya-sūtra)'International Journal of Buddhist Thought & Culture. February 2006, Vol.6, pp.121-205.

KIMURA Takayasu (2010). Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā. Vol. I-1, Tokyo: Sankibo Busshorin 2007. http://fiindolo.sub.uni-goettingen.de/gretil/1_sanskr/4_rellit/buddh/psp_1u.htm [Input by Klaus Wille, Göttingen, April 2010].

Lopez, Donald S. (1988) The Heart Sūtra Explained: Indian and Tibetan Commentaries. State University of New York Press.

Lopez, Donald S. (1996) Elaborations on Emptiness: Uses of the Heart Sutra. Princeton University Press.

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

Shih, Heng-Ching & Lusthaus, Dan. (2006) A Comprehensive Commentary on the Heart Sutra (Prajnaparamita-hyrdaya-sutra). Numata Center for Buddhist Translation & Research.

Sperber, Dan. (2010) The Guru Effect. Review of Philosophy and Psychology. 1:583–592 DOI 10.1007/s13164-010-0025-0

Tanahashi, Kazuki. (2014). The Heart Sutra: A Comprehensive Guide to the Classic of Mahayana Buddhism. Shambala.

Zacchetti, Stefano. (2005) In Praise of the Light: A Critical Synoptic Edition with an Annotated Translation of Chapters 1-3 of Dharmarakṣa's Guang zan jing, Being the Earliest Chinese Translation of the Larger Prajñāpāramitā, Tokyo. (Bibliotheca Philologica et Philosophica Buddhica, 8). IRIAB. Sanskrit text also available from Gretil.

Part II will be published 24 July 2015.

~~Continued from Form is Emptiness. Part I: Establishing the Text (17 Jul 2015)~~

Traditional Commentaries

We have available in translation, two very early Chinese commentaries by Xuánzàng's top students Kuījī 窺基 (Shih & Lusthaus 2006) and Woncheuk 원측 (Hyun Choo 2006). These date from the 7^thcentury, close to the composition of the text, with a strong suggestion that Woncheuk had a Sanskrit text to consult. (Lusthaus 2003). Kūkai's commentary from the early 9^th century is perhaps the first Tantric commentary, and gives us insights into Kūkai's thought (Hakeda 1972). We also have eight Indian commentaries from the 8^th-12^th centuries preserved in Tibetan, translated and studied by Donald Lopez (1988, 1996). However, as almost every scholar who has ever studied these commentaries has complained, they are resolutely sectarian.

"One feature of these commentaries on the Heart Sūtra struck me quite forcibly: each commentary seemed so different from the others, and yet they seemed all to show in greater or less degree the influence of the Mādhyamika School of Buddhist philosophy. The writers seemed to be experiencing some difficulty in exposition, as though they were not writing through having inherited a tradition about the scripture going back to its original composition, but rather were simply arranging their particularly learning in Buddhism to the terminology of the sūtra." (Wayman 1984: 309)

Each commentator takes the Heart Sutra to epitomise their views on Buddhism, whatever their views happen to be. There is no commentarial tradition which ties the Heart Sutra into the early Prajñāpāramitā tradition where it arguably belongs, since, especially with the words of this passage we are dealing with here, the ideas come from the early centuries of the Common Era at the latest. As Malcolm David Eckel says:

"... to approach the Indian commentaries in the hope that they will somehow yield the 'original' meaning of the text is to invite disappointment... what they thought it mean was shaped as much by the preoccupations of their own time as it was by the words of the sūtra itself. (Eckel 1987: 69-70)

The traditional commentaries are in short a major disappointment. The Chinese commentaries, for example, are couched in thick and impenetrable Yogācāra jargon. Without their own commentary, the commentaries don't really make sense. The language of the translations in both cases is classic Buddhist Hybrid English, but worse, Kuījī constantly contradicts himself, alternating between telling us that dharmas exist and do not exist, perhaps as a result of a commitment to the Two Truths. It means that his argument on this passage is, on face value, incoherent. The Indian commentaries preserved in Tibetan have much the same problems, though looking at the Heart Sutra from different sectarian points of view. None take the text as their starting point. All take their belief system as a starting point and try to shoehorn the Heart Sutra into it. In other words no commentator is trying to explain the text, they are using the text as a cipher to expound their existing views. Which means that, though they might be interesting historical documents in their own right, they are next to useless in the quest to understand the text on its own terms.

There is one source which is not a commentary on the passage, but which may help reveal something about the text. As we know this part of the Heart Sutra is an extract from the Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā, but the Pañcaviṃśati itself is an extrapolation from the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā. One way to approach understanding this passage, then, is to attempt to locate the original passage in Aṣṭa from which is descends and see what it says. I believe I can point to the passage in question and that it sheds previously unseen light on this famous rebus. Before we get there, however, we need to consider modern commentary

Modern Commentary

Unfortunately all the remarks that apply to traditional commentaries can also be applied to modern ones. With one exception that I am aware of, which is in Jones (2012). Jones is a relative outsider in that he does not seem to hold either an academic or ecclesiastical post, but he does have appropriate qualifications and is well versed in Prajñāpāramitā and Madhyamaka literature. And although his approach to translating the Heart Sutra is a sectarian one (based, I think, on the Yogācāra inspired exposition of Alex Wayman, though he neglects to say), in his book of Prajñāpāramitā translations there is a short essay on just the passage we are considering (2012: 224-226). Jones initially expresses considerable misgivings about "form is emptiness, emptiness only form". "In fact," he says, "the claim is odd."

The first problem is that the text appears to make śūnyatā into "an ontological source of some kind... rather than simply the absence of self-existence." Jones cites Thích Nhất Hạnh as a populariser of this view when he says: "form is the wave, and emptiness is the water". But this is completely out of keeping with Prajñāpāramitā and with Madhyamaka thinking about śūnyatā. There is nothing that emptiness "is" because conceptually and semantically it denotes an absence! If in Nhất Hạnh's metaphor emptiness is the water, then it is a presence of something from which waves are made, not the absence that helps us to see the wave is insubstantial.

A related problem is that form is, in the Two Truths view, ultimately "unreal" whereas śūnyatā is not. I take issue with Jones here on the basis of Kātyāyana: real and unreal are not qualities that can be imputed to experience. What he means, I think, is that dharmas arise and pass away, whereas śūnyatā is always the characteristic of all dharmas. Form is contingent, but all forms lack svabhāva. To try to equate the two, as the Heart Sutra seems to, is to make a category error. My own view is that equating a substantive (rūpa) with an abstract (śūnyatā) is as best linguistically awkward, at worst nonsense. Jones briefly notes the alternate reading in some sources i.e. "form is empty" (rupam śūnyam). Which is fine until we try to turn it around and discover that nouns and adjectives play different roles in language and can't be interchanged. The irony here, as we will see below, is that in a sutra largely devoted to negations, this positive assertion is the most problematic passage in the text.

However by the end of his short treatise, Jones seems to have convinced himself that the passage does make sense.

"...'form is emptiness' appears to mean that emptiness does not exist apart from the bodily aggregates and the other factors of the experienced world. Emptiness is not an ontological source or some transcendental reality to be attained by abolishing the phenomenal realm." (226)

Thus Jones manages to convince himself, through invoking "a Gestalt-like shift" that the text that seemed so problematic to begin with, in fact confirms his understanding of Perfection of Wisdom according to Nāgārjuna. The problems in Buddhist texts have to be rationalised and normalised. When one's hermeneutic disallows nonsense, then finding it, one will simply re-interpret it as a new kind of sense that requires a special counter-intuitive perspective. At least Jones does not look down on his audience for their not having that special perspective, in the way that Conze did.

My approach is different. In my hermeneutic "nonsense" is not just a possible reading, it is expected. Reading a text as trying to express something about experience is a productive approach, but it cannot solve all the problems encountered, precisely because the author was frequently trying to make an ontological point. All ontologies that are based on the raw phenomenology of experience hold the possibility of error, of confusion, and of nonsense. Nonsense is a likely outcome when generalising about reality from individual experience. And this is not simply my opinion. The early Buddhists knew this, at least in principle, when they spelled out the kinds of wrong views that one could come to by generalising on the basis of recollecting one's former lives through psychic powers developed in the fourth jhāna, see the Brahmajāla Sutta (DN 1; i.12-16).Thus we can expect to find nonsense as Buddhists embrace speculations about ontology, and by the time of the Heart Sutra, this embrace was already locked in.

Thus primed we can now move on to considering what the Aṣṭa can tell us about the Heart Sutra.

Aṣṭasāharsrikā Prajñāpāramitā

The first thing to say by way of commentary is that remarks about form (rūpa) and emptiness apply just as much to the other skandhas individually and collectively. We usually give extra weight to form because it is used as the example for this analysis, but this skews the view. Yes, form is empty of svabhāva, but so is sensation (vedanā), apperception (saṃjñā), volition (saṃskāra) and cognition (vijñāna); or all five together, since they only ever operate collectively. We could just as well conduct the whole discussion in terms of vedanā or saṃjñā. And that would give the discussion a very different feel, because the temptation to make an ontology out of vedanā or saṃjñā must be considerably less. If anything, such a discussion would tend to Idealism. So any conclusions we come to must be applicable to the entire apparatus of experience, not just to the locus or object of experience (rūpa).

Another preliminary comment is that talk of śūnyatā is, at least in part, an invocation of the three liberations (P. vimokkha) the signless (animitta); desireless (apaṇihita) and emptiness (suññatā). These refer to profound states of absorption in which sense experience does not impinge on the mind at all. It's entirely possible that some of these passages in the Prajñāpāramitā, in which the bodhisatva 'grasps at nothing' etc, relate to śūnyatā-vimokṣa. Compare the two suññatā suttas (MN 121, 122) and the Mahāvedalla Sutta (MN 43). More on these at a later date.

The Heart Sutra passage is in the third chapter of Pañcaviṃśāti, so we expect to find any corresponding passages early on in Aṣṭa, probably in the first chapter. Where possible I will try to supply parallels from the first century CE Gāndhārī Aṣṭa (Falk & Karashima 2012). The Aṣṭa is full of references to śūnyatā, but not in the first chapter. However there are two passages in Chapter One which shed light on the Heart Sutra. The first is:

That said, Elder Subhuti said to Elder Śāriputra... "Form, Elder Śāriputra, is free from self-existent form; just so for sensation, names, volition; discernment, Elder Śāriputra, is free of self-existent discernment. Perfect-wisdom, Elder Śāriputra, is free of self-existent perfect-wisdom. Omniscience is free of self-existent omniscience. Perfect-wisdom is also free of the characteristic of perfect-wisdom. A characteristic is free of self-existent characteristics. The signified is free of self-existent. The self-existent is also free of a characteristic of self-existent signification. (Aṣṭa 1.12; Vaidya p.6)

The highlighted sentence takes the form: rūpam eva virahitaṃ rūpasvabhāvena. This is fairly standard Buddhist metaphysics, and quite similar to the kind of argument we see in the Vajracchedikā-prajñāpāramitā also (See The use of Negation in Vajracchedikā). Although we experience form, or experience ourselves as having form, there is no self-existent form. "Form" arises because sense object meets sense faculty in the presence of sense cognition; because the apparatus of experience is functioning. There is no 'essence of form' to give being to form. This places a struct limit on epistemology, on what we can know. Knowing the dependently arisen form does not give us knowledge of the object, only the experience. From a modern perspective this is too restrictive (I'll discuss this in a forthcoming essay), but for now we need to accept that early Mainstream Buddhists accepted this limit on knowledge and seem to have passed it on to some early Mahāyāna Buddhists. Additionally, as per Nāgārjuna's argument, if a form were to be endowed with self-existent form, then that form would either never exist, or always exist. Because experience is constantly arising and passing away, we know that it cannot have svabhāva in the sense of self-existence. (See also Emptiness for Beginners) Which also ties into the rejection of the terms existence and non-existence in discussing experience. And this is what we take "form is emptiness" to mean, though why the abstract noun śūnyatā is used in the Heart Sutra is, as I say, unclear.

We surmise that the problem that passages like this are addressing is the incipient Realism of the Abhidharma project. It used to be thought that this kind of language was a direct dig at the Sarvāstivādins. In fact seems to be a generalised critique with nothing specific to the Sarvāstivāda. The authors of the Abhidharma started out using the word svabhāba to mean something like a characteristic quality. At first it defined categories into which dharmas could be slotted. Gradually the dharmas themselves came to be seen as having these qualities. And before long the defining characteristic took on a separate life, that did not arise and pass away. The early Prajñāpāramitā texts were in part a general critique of this kind of erroneous thinking.

So this first passage from Aṣṭa critiques Realism with respect to dharmas. But what we are ideally looking for is a discussion of the emptiness of dharmas. The second passage which sheds light is the only part of Chapter One that uses the word śūnya.

Furthermore Elder Subhūti, having begun [describing?] the bodhisatva mahāsatva thus, said: if he practises with respect to form, he practices with respect to a sign (nimitta). If he practises with respect to an external characteristic of form, he practices with respect to a sign. If he practises with respect to ‘this is a feature of form’, he practices with respect to a sign. If he practises with respect to the arising of form, he practices with respect to a sign. If he practises with respect to the cessation of form, he practices with respect to a sign. If he practises with respect to the destruction of form, he practices with respect to a sign.If he practises with respect to ‘form is empty’, he practices with respect to a sign. If he practises with respect to ‘I am practising’, he practices with respect to a sign. If he practises with respect to ‘I am a bodhisatva’, he practices with respect to a sign. Just perceiving ‘I am a bodhisatva’ he practices.

Thus with respect to sensation, designation, volitions.

If he practises with respect to discernment, he practices with respect to a sign. If he practises with respect to an external characteristic of discernment, he practices with respect to a sign. If he practises with respect to ‘this is a feature of discernment’, he practices with respect to a sign. If he practises with respect to the arising of discernment, he practices with respect to a sign. If he practises with respect to the cessation of discernment, he practices with respect to a sign. If he practises with respect to the destruction of discernment, he practices with respect to a sign. If he practises with respect to ‘discernment is empty’, he practices with respect to a sign. If he practises with respect to ‘I am practising’, he practices with respect to a sign. If he practises with respect to ‘I am a bodhisatva’, he practices with respect to a sign. Just perceiving ‘I am a bodhisattva’ he practices. If moreover there is [the thought] ‘he practices with respect to the perfection of wisdom who thus practises, creating the perfection of wisdom’ he practices only [with] external features. This bodhisatva is called ‘not skilled in the good’ (Aṣṭa 1.14)

The passage is in fact one long paragraph, but I have broken it up and added some highlighting to make the structure of it more clear. For the Gāndhārī manuscript and notes on Chinese counterparts compare Falk & Karashima (2012: 57 & n.52). The first section critiques the idea of practising with respect to form. If one's orientation is to experience, then even if one is practising for the end of experience, it is still practising relative to experience. The form that impacts on the sense, causing an experience to arise and then cease, is of no interest to the bodhisatva. It's all just sense experience and being caught up in sense experience is what traps us in saṃsāra. So the idea is to unhook from sense experience completely. And one of the ways of expressing this is the almost familiar phrase:

saced rūpaṃ śūnyamiti carati, nimitte carati | (Aṣṭa 1.14.7)

If he practises with respect to ‘form is empty’, he practices with respect to a sign.

The part in quotes is our familiar line rūpaṃ śūnyam'form is empty'. In the Pañcaviṃśati, and therefore in the Heart Sutra, the statement has become decontextualised and abstracted: śūnyatā is an abstract noun from śūnya as 'emptiness' is an abstraction from 'empty'. Aṣṭa is saying that if one practices with the idea that 'form is empty', then one is still getting it wrong, because one is still practising with respect to sense experience. And yet, this is a common interpretation. Buddhists go around quoting "form is emptiness" as though it is profound, as though it is the whole point, when Aṣṭa more or less says that it is a delusion. And this is so because, as the first passage says, form is free of self-existent form.

Now, as we know, liberation (temporary or permanent) is signless (animitta). And this description of the bodhisatva's practice reads very like descriptions of the experience of vimokṣa described in the Pāli suññata suttas (MN 121,122). I just want to flag up this connection and will explore it in another essay.

In a later chapter the Aṣṭa expands on the emptiness of dharmas in a familiar way:

Here Subhūti, the bodhisatvas mahāsatvas, being fully enlightened Buddhas, teach the dharma that form has the [same] condition of space in the world. So also sensation, apperception, and volition. In the same way, Subhūti, all dharmas have the condition of space, not coming, not going, just like space. Just as space does not come or go; it is not made or unmade or shaped, it does not last, remain, or endure, it does not arise or cease, so also all dharmas do not come or go; they are is not made or unmade or shaped, they do not last, remain, or endure, they do not arise or cease. Why is that? Subhuti, the emptiness of form does not come or go. So also with sensations, apperception, and volition. The emptiness of cognitions does not come or go. In the same way, Subhūti, the emptiness of all dharmas does not come or go. The reason is that all dharmas are in a state of emptiness. They cannot escape that state. (Aṣṭa 15.2 Vaidya 148)

The important point here seems to be that the bodhisatva must not identify with the world of experience. And this is where we might think of the bodhisatva as in the state of śūnyatāvimokṣa in which the world of experience has effectively ceased. In the terminology of the Spiral Path they become fed up (nibbidā) with sense experience and lose their fascination with it (virāga) and are thus liberated from saṃsāra (vimukti), which in turn produces the knowledge that they are liberated (vimuktijñāṇa). It is the last that is communicated to disciples in order to cause the arising of faith in the Tathāgata. Note that Aṣṭa says "all dharmas are in a state of emptiness" (śūnyatāgatikā sarvadharmāḥ) which echoes the Heart Sutra's phrase "all dharmas are characterised by emptiness" (sarvadharmāḥ śūnyatālakṣanāḥ).

So far this is all pretty standard Prajñāpāramitā, even if the emphasis is somewhat different from the usual Heart Sutra commentary. The Aṣṭa has interesting things to say about the Heart Sutra, particularly that practising with respect to "form is empty" is still not what the bodhisatva does. This is still a concept and the bodhisatva, perhaps in the meditative state known as śūnyatā-vimokṣa, does not pay attention to any such concepts. To emphasise this phrase is not necessarily the same as being wise.

Next week, however, we will be going off piste. It turns out that the phrase that everyone knows and loves was significantly altered when it moved from Aṣṭa to Pañcaviṃśati. The version of the phrase in Aṣṭa opens up a whole new vista for thinking about the Heart Sutra and what it might mean.

~~Continued in Part III - 31 July 2015~~

Bibliography

Chinese Texts from the CBETA version of the Taishō. http://www.cbeta.org

Sanskrit texts from Göttingen Register of Electronic Texts in Indian Languages (Gretil) http://gretil.sub.uni-goettingen.de/

Except

Vajracchedikā-prajñāpāramitā from Harrison & Watanabe, as simplified on Bibliotecha Polyglota.
Prajñāpāramitā-ratnaguṇasaṃcaya-gāthā from Yuyama, Akira. (1976)

______________________________________

Attwood, Jayarava (2014) Escaping the Inescapable: Changes in Buddhist Karma. Journal of Buddhist Ethics. 21: 503-535.

Attwood, Jayarava (2015). Heart Murmurs: Some Problems with Conze’s Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya. Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies. 8: 28-48.

Conze, Edward. (1967) ‘The Prajñāpāramitā-Hṛdaya Sūtra’ in Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies: Selected Essays, Bruno Cassirer, pp. 147-167. [revised version of Conze (1948).]

Eckel, Malcolm David. (1987) Indian Commentaries on the Heart Sūtra: The Politics of Interpretation. The Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies. 10(2): 69-79

Falk, Harry & Karashima, Seishi. (2012) A first‐century Prajñāpāramitā manuscript from Gandhāra - parivarta 1 (Texts from the Split Collection 1). ARIRIAB XV, 19-61. Online: https://www.academia.edu/3561115/prajnaparamita-5

Hakeda, Yoshito (1972). The Secret Key to the Heart Sutra inKūkai: Major Works. Columbia University Press.

Hamilton, Sue. (2000) Early Buddhism: A New Approach. London: Routledge.

Hyun Choo, B. (2006) 'An English Translation of the Banya paramilda simgyeong chan: Wonch'uk's Commentary on the Heart Sūtra (Prajñāpāramitā-hṛdaya-sūtra)' International Journal of Buddhist Thought & Culture. February 2006, Vol.6, pp.121-205.

Jones, Richard H. (2012) The Heart of Wisdom. Jackson Square Books.

KIMURA Takayasu (2010). Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā. Vol. I-1, Tokyo: Sankibo Busshorin 2007. http://fiindolo.sub.uni-goettingen.de/gretil/1_sanskr/4_rellit/buddh/psp_1u.htm [Input by Klaus Wille, Göttingen, April 2010].

Lopez, Donald S. (1988) The Heart Sūtra Explained: Indian and Tibetan Commentaries. State University of New York Press.

Lopez, Donald S. (1996) Elaborations on Emptiness: Uses of the Heart Sutra. Princeton University Press.

Lusthaus, Dan. (2003) The Heart Sūtra in Chinese Yogācāra: Some Comparative Comments on the Heart Sūtra Commentaries of Wŏnch’ŭk and K’uei-chi. International Journal of Buddhist Thought & Culture. September, Vol. 3: 59-103.

Huifeng [aka Orsborn, M. B.] (2008) A Survey Of Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra Translations In Chinese. Online: http://prajnacara.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/survey-of-prajnaparamita-sutra.html.

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

Shih, Heng-Ching & Lusthaus, Dan. (2006) A Comprehensive Commentary on the Heart Sutra (Prajnaparamita-hyrdaya-sutra). Numata Center for Buddhist Translation & Research.

Sperber, Dan. (2010) The Guru Effect. Review of Philosophy and Psychology. 1:583–592 DOI 10.1007/s13164-010-0025-0

Tanahashi, Kazuki. (2014). The Heart Sutra: A Comprehensive Guide to the Classic of Mahayana Buddhism. Shambala.

Wayman, Alex. (1984) Buddhist Insight: Essays. Motilal Banarsidass.

Yuyama, Akira. (1976) Prajñā-pāramitā-ratna-guṇa-saṃcaya-gāthā (Sanskrit Recension A). Cambridge University Press.

Zacchetti, Stefano. (2005) In Praise of the Light: A Critical Synoptic Edition with an Annotated Translation of Chapters 1-3 of Dharmarakṣa's Guang zan jing, Being the Earliest Chinese Translation of the Larger Prajñāpāramitā, Tokyo. (Bibliotheca Philologica et Philosophica Buddhica, 8). IRIAB. Sanskrit text also available from Gretil.

Although I don't cite it directly, the material on śūnyatāvimokṣa is inspired by an essay privately circulated by my colleague Satyadhāna. It popped up rather late in the process of constructing this essay (which is already about 12,000 words long over three parts). I'm hoping it might be made more widely available, because it seems to me to provide further keys for understanding the early Perfection of Wisdom. I plan to survey the relevant Pāḷi texts and their Chinese counterparts as soon as is practical. My sense is that there is considerable continuity between them and Aṣṭa.

______________________________________

Sanskrit Aṣṭasāhasrikā Passages

Numbers in square brackets are pages in Vaidya's Edition.

1.14. punaraparamāyuṣmān subhūtir bodhisattvaṃ mahāsattvam ārabhyaivam āha – saced rūpe carati, nimitte carati | saced rūpanimitte carati, nimitte carati | saced ‘rūpaṃ nimittam’ iti carati, nimitte carati | sa ced rūpasyotpāde carati, nimitte carati | saced rūpasya nirodhe carati, nimitte carati | saced rūpasya vināśe carati, nimitte carati | saced rūpaṃ śūnyamiti carati, nimitte carati | ahaṃ carāmīti carati, nimitte carati | ahaṃ bodhisattva iti carati, nimitte carati | ahaṃ bodhisattva iti hy upalambha eva sa carati | evaṃ saced vidanāyāṃ saṃjñāyāṃ saṃskāreṣu | saced vijñāne carati, nimitte carati | saced vijñānanimitte carati, nimitte carati sacedvijñānaṃ nimittamiti carati, nimitte carati | saced vijñānasyotpāde carati, nimitte carati | saced vijñānasya nirodhe carati, nimitte carati | saced vijñānasya vināśe carati, nimitte carati | saced vijñānaṃ śūnyamiti carati, nimitte carati | ahaṃ carāmīti carati, nimitte carati | ahaṃ bodhisattva iti carati, nimitte carati | ahaṃ bodhisattva iti hy upalambha eva sa carati| sacet punarasyaivaṃ bhavati - ya evaṃ carati, sa prajñāpāramitāyāṃ carati, sa prajñāpāramitāṃ bhāvayatīti, nimitta eva sa carati | ayaṃ bodhisattvo 'nupāyakuśalo veditavyaḥ ||

1.22 atha khalvāyuṣmān subhūtir bhagavantam etada vocat - yo bhagavan evaṃ paripṛcchet - kimayaṃ māyāpuruṣāḥ sarvajñatāyāṃ śikṣiṣyate, sarvajñatāyā āsannībhaviṣyati, sarvajñatāyāṃ niryāsyatīti? tasya bhagavan evaṃ paripṛcchataḥ kathaṃ nirdeṣṭavyaṃ syāt? evamukte bhagavānāyuṣmantaṃ subhūtimetadavocat - tena hi subhūte tvāmevātra pratiprakṣyāmi / yathā te kṣamate, tathā vyākuryāḥ / sādhu bhagavannityāyuṣmān subhūtirbhagavataḥ pratyaśrauṣīt / bhagavānetadavocat - tatkiṃ manyase subhūte anyā sā māyā, anyattadrūpam, anyā sā māyā, anyā sā vedanā / anyā sā saṃjñā, anye te saṃskārāḥ / anyā sā māyā, anyattadvijñānam? subhūtirāha - na hyetadbhagavan / na hi bhagavan anyā sā māyā anyattadrūpam / rūpameva bhagavan māyā, māyaiva rūpam / na hi bhagavan anyā sā māyā anyā sā vedanā, anyā sā saṃjñā anye te saṃskārāḥ / vedanā saṃjñā [9] saṃskārā eva bhagavan māyā, māyaiva vedanāsaṃjñāsaṃskārāḥ / na bhagavan anyā sā māyā anyattadvijñānam / vijñānameva bhagavan māyā, māyaiva vijñānam //

15.2 iha subhūte bodhisattvā mahāsattvā anuttarāṃ samyaksaṃbodhimabhisaṃbuddhāḥ santo lokasya ākāśagatikaṃ rupamiti dharmaṃ deśayanti / evaṃ vedanā saṃjñā saṃskārāḥ / evameva subhūte sarvadharmā ākāśagatikā anāgatikā agatikā ākāśasamāḥ / yathā ākāśam anāgatam agatam akṛtam avikṛtam anabhisaṃskṛtam, asthitam asaṃsthitam avyavasthitam , anutpannam aniruddham, evameva subhūte sarvadharmā anāgatā āgatā ākṛtā avikṛtā anabhisaṃskṛtā asthitā asaṃsthitā avyavasthitā anutpannā aniruddhā ākāśakalpatvādavikalpāḥ / tatkasya hetoḥ? yā subhūte rūpasya śūnyatā, na sā āgacchati vā gacchati vā / evaṃ vedanāyāḥ saṃjñāyāḥ saṃskārāṇām / yā subhūte vijñānasya śūnyatā, na sā āgacchati vā gacchati vā / evameva subhūte yā sarvadharmāṇāṃ śūnyatā, na sā āgacchati vā gacchati vā / tatkasya hetoḥ? śūnyatāgatikā hi subhūte sarvadharmāḥ / te tāṃ gatiṃ na vyativartante /[148]

~~Continued in Part III - 31 July 2015~~

~~Continued from Part I& Part II~~

I've combined the three parts of this essay into a single pdf:
Form is (Not) Emptiness.

Previously: In Part I, we explored the language of the passage associated with the phrase "form is emptiness, emptiness is only form". We identified the authoritative versions of the passage, in Sanskrit and Chinese, in the Heart Sutra and the source of the quotation, the Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā-prajñāpāramitā-sūtra. In Part II, we glossed over the existing commentaries, discarding them largely because they treat the Heart Sutra as a tabula rasa on which can be asserted various sectarians versions of Buddhism. We then began to explore passages from the Aṣṭasahāsrikā-prajñāpāramitā-sūtra (Aṣṭa) to see what they might tell us about the phrase "form is emptiness, emptiness only form" from the Heart Sutra. The method is productive of interesting commentary on the passage, but we had not found an exact parallel. In Part III we begin to dig deeper.

Māyā

So far we've been looking for a statement along the lines of "rūpaṃ śūnyatā", which would be the obvious ancestor of the line from the Heart Sutra. So far the approach has been productive, but we haven't really hit the mother lode. But what if, in being transmitted, the text was changed in an unexpected way? What if, for example, a key word was changed? Is this plausible?

In fact this seems to be what has happened. In Chapter One of Aṣṭa (1.22) we find a passage that is identical in syntax to the famous passage from Pañcaviṃśati, except that one of the words has been changed. This passage follows on from the one that I identified with the Kātyāyana Sūtra in an essay a few weeks ago. The context is a series of questions and answers on the subject of how a Bodhisattva trains. The passage we are looking at begins with Subhūti asking a question of the Buddha:

"If the Bhagavan were asked, 'Can the man of illusions (māyā-puruṣa) train in omniscience (sarvajñā), will he come near it, will he go forth to it?' How would the Bhagavan explain the answer to this question?"

Here sarvajñā'complete knowledge, omniscience' is a synonym of prajñāpāramitā and originally of mahājñāna (which was hyper-Sanskritised to mahāyāna as we saw in Early Mahāyāna). In East Asia manuscripts of the Heart Sutra the maṅgala is often namas sarvajñāya. This seems to be the first mention of the māyāpuruṣa or 'man of illusions', or as Conze translations "illusory man", so we're not quite sure of the context of the word. By way of answer the Buddha asks Subhūti a related question:

"What do you think Subhūti: is illusion (māyā) different from form? Different from sensation, apperception, or volition? Is illusion different from cognition?"

The key phrase in Sanskrit is "anyā sā māyā anyat tad rūpam". This is starting to seem familiar. The form of this question also suggests that Conze has erred in interpreting māyāpuruṣa. It's not an adjective 'illusory', not 'the man who is illusory', rather 'illusion' is a substantive, as in the 'man who is an illusion' or more likely '...has illusions'. The Buddha seems to be asking whether we can separate the man from his illusions about experience. Subhuti answers:

"It is not the case, Bhagavan, that illusion is different form. Bhagavan, the illusion is form; form is only an illusion. It is not the case, Bhagavan, that illusion is different from sensation, from apperception, from volition. The illusion is only sensation, apperception and volition, and sensation, apperception and volition are only illusions. It is not, Bhagavan that illusion is different from cognition. The illusion is cognition; cognition is only an illusion."

What the Buddha is saying here is that illusions (things the unenlightened take to be real) are not found outside the five branches of experience (pañcaskandhāḥ), but in fact that the five branches of experience are the illusion. At least to the unenlightened, experience is an illusion that we buy into. This is a useful observation.

Even more interesting is that this passage from Aṣṭa uses exactly the same syntax as used in the Heart Sutra passage from Pañcaviṃśati with one change: the word śūnyatā is replaced by māyā. A reminder that the form of the words from the Heart Sutra found in Pañcaviṃśati is:

nānyad rūpam anyā śūnyatā | nānyā śūnyatā anyad rūpaṃ | rūpam eva śūnyatā | śūnyataiva rūpam

And here in Aṣṭa

na hi anyā sā māyā anyat tad rūpam | rūpam eva māyā | māyaiva rūpam |

In Aṣṭa it is part of a discussion between the Buddha and Subhūti, but in Pañcaviṃśati the protagonists are the Buddha and Śāriputra, and in the Heart Sutra they are Avalokiteśvara and Śāriputra. There are some minor spelling differences caused by sandhi, and by the use of pronouns in Aṣṭa, but neither the words nor the grammar is changed by this. Aṣṭa only has three phrases, to Pañcaviṃśati's four, leaving off an equivalent of nānyad rūpam anyā śūnyatā. Otherwise the two passages are more or less the same. Too similar for this to be a coincidence. The Aṣṭa passage has to be the source of the passage in Pañcaviṃśati that became the famous line in the Heart Sutra,but with reference to illusion rather than emptiness.

Unfortunately I have not been able to locate this passage in the Gāndhārī manuscript published by Falk & Karashima (2012). However, we can find a probable counterpart to this passage in the Ratnaguṇasaṃcayagāthā (Rgs).

māyopamāṃ ya iha jānati pañca skandhāṃ
na ca māya anya na ca skandha karoti anyān |
nānātvasaṃjñavigato upaśāntacārī
eṣā sa prajñavarapāramitāya caryā || Rgs_1.14 ||

Here, the one who knows that the five skandhas are like an illusion,
Does not make illusion one thing and the skandhas another;
The one who practices for peace is free of multiplying perceptions,
His practice is the highest perfection of understanding.

The Relation Between rūpa and māyā.

The phrase in Aṣṭa, with "illusion", makes sense in both directions with māyā: "the illusion is form; form is only an illusion." Or "form is an illusion, which is the illusion of form." Indeed this is fairly standard Buddhist rhetoric about the nature of experience, which seeks to undermine our fascination (or intoxication) with sense experience and encourages us to do the practices which enable us to detach (sober up) from it (especially the vimokṣa practices found in MN 121 & 122).

Initially in Buddhist texts, the relationship between form and illusion is stated as a simile. We find it said in Aṣṭa for example that form is like an illusion (māyopamaṃ rūpam. Aṣṭa 9 cf. Rgs 1.14a). The same simile is given at the end of the Vajracchedikā:

tārakā timiraṃ dīpo māyāvaśyāya budbudaḥ
supinaṃ vidyud abhraṃ ca evaṃ draṣṭavya saṃskṛtam | || Vaj 22

We should see the conditioned as a star, a kind of blindness, a lamp,
An illusion, a dew drop, a bubble, a dream, a lightening flash, a cloud.

The simile is well known and comes from early Buddhism. For example in the Pāḷi Pheṇapiṇḍūpama Sutta (SN 22.95) we find it stated like this:

Evameva kho, bhikkhave, yaṃ kiñci rūpaṃ atītānāgatapaccuppannaṃ [ajjhattaṃ vā bahiddhā vā, oḷārikaṃ vā sukhumaṃ vā, hīnaṃ vā paṇītaṃ vā], yaṃ dūre santike vā taṃ bhikkhu passati nijjhāyati yoniso upaparikkhati. Tassa taṃ passato nijjhāyato yoniso upaparikkhato rittakaññeva khāyati, tucchakaññeva khāyati, asārakaññeva khāyati. Kiñhi siyā, bhikkhave, rūpe sāro?

Just so, Bhikkhus, a bhikkhu sees some form, past, future or present, internal or external, gross or subtle, inferior or superior, faraway or right here, he studies it, investigates its origins... and it appears to him unreal (rittaka), empty (tucchaka), without substance (asāraka). After all, what substance (sāra) is there in form?

The word sāra here might also be translated by 'essence', a metaphor drawn from the heartwood of a tree. In the passage below a plantain tree lacks any wood, let alone heartwood. The point being that nothing real comes into being when we have an experience that can be designated 'form'. 'Form' is a label we apply to experience, even when we think we are applying it to the world. Pheṇa concludes with a verse similar to Vaj.

Pheṇapiṇḍūpamaṃ rūpaṃ, vedanā bubbuḷūpamā
Marīcikūpamā saññā, saṅkhārā kadalūpamā;
Māyūpamañca viññāṇaṃ, desitādiccabandhunā.

Form is like a ball of foam, sensation like a bubble.
Apperception is like a mirage, volition like a plantain
Cognition is like an illusion. So the kinsman of the Sun taught.

So there is some continuity of this idea from Mainstream Buddhism into the early Prajñāpāramitā texts (Aṣṭa, Rgs, and Vaj). Unfortunately, the replacement of māyā with śūnyatā in the comparison breaks the metaphor and the statement no longer makes sense. What makes the Aṣṭa version work is that māyā is another substantive noun (even though illusions are insubstantial). In rūpameva māyā we are comparing two substantives in a well known metaphoric relationship, based on an old simile. Anyone familiar with Buddhist literature is aware of the kinds of comparisons quoted above and can contextualise the statement to make sense of it. However śūnyatā is an abstract noun from an adjective. In order for the apposition to really work we need something like rūpatā śūnyata'formness is emptiness', but this still does make sense when we reverse it. So the substitution of śūnyatā for māyā leaves us with a mess of grammatical and exegetical problems. In short it seems to have been a mistake.

But is it plausible to say that an ancient editor introduced a mistake into a "sacred" Buddhist text, rendering it nonsensical? Before answering this question we need to follow the lead just discovered a little longer. The invocation of māyā leads us back to the Pañcaviṃśati, which reinforces the idea that we have discovered the origin of the "form is emptiness" passage.

Back to Pañcaviṃśati

In a forthcoming article I show that the passage known as "the epithets of the mantra" has two possible sources in Pañcaviṃśati that occur close together. One is far more likely to be the source, but the two are very similar in wording apart from the context. Nattier (1992) noted that in the epithets that the word vidyā had been translated into Chinese and then came out as mantra in the Sanskrit Heart Sutra. My article will examine this case in more detail.

Alerted by the word māyā to look again at the Pañcaviṃśati I discovered that the "rūpam śunyatā" phrase also occurs twice. The other occurrence is at the beginning of Chapter Three. The form here is a dialogue between the Buddha and Śāriputra, and one of the main differences from Aṣṭa is that the answers are more long winded. Śāriputra asks how a bodhisatva ought to practice (caritavyam). In the Gilgit ms. the Buddha begins his reply iha śāradvatīputra (recall how uncertain was the wording of this address in Part 1). The fact that Śāriputra is the interlocutor here also brings us closer to the Heart Sutra.

Importantly, the Buddha's reply is that the bodhisatva does not samanupaśyati'perceive, observe, regard, consider' anything about themselves or what they are doing (which sounds a lot like śūnyatāvimokṣa). And they especially don't perceive/consider the skandhas. And why not?

Because a bodhisatva is indeed empty of self-existence. It is not through being empty that form, sensation, apperception, volition and cognition are empty. Emptiness is not separate (anyatra†) from form. Emptiness is not separate from sensation, apperception, volition and cognition. Form is only emptiness. Sensation, apperception, volition and cognition are only emptiness.

† Note here that anya (other, different) is replaced by the locative anyatra (elsewhere, elsewhen).

What is the reason? Because this is a mere name; bodhi and bodhisatva are mere names which are emptiness. Form, sensation, apperception, volition and cognition are mere names. Because form, sensation, apperception, volition and cognition are like illusions (māyopama) and a mere name is not situated or located [anywhere]: non-existent, unreal, false, an illusory idea, self-existenceless, and without self-existence, non-arising, non-ceasing, not decreasing or growing, not defilement or purification.

Although we can be fairly sure that the quotation from the Heart Sutra is taken from the passage a little further on, this passage may well have been influential. What this passage does, is tie us back to the Aṣṭa more clearly through the reference to the skandhas being mere names (nāmamātra) and like illusions (māyā-upama). The use of the locative adverbial pronoun, anyatra, means we read the text as saying that emptiness is not found outside of form in time or space. Emptiness, then, is a quality of experience, rather than a quality of reality. Or we might say that phenomena are characterised by emptiness and noumena remain unknown and (as far as Buddhists are concerned) unknowable.

It becomes more clear why a bodhisatva is doing a skandha reflection at the beginning of the Heart Sutra. The context in the Pañcaviṃśati is precisely this:

kathaṃ punar bhagavan bodhisatvena mahāsatvena prajñāpāramitāyāṃ caritavyam

How moreover, Bhagavan, should the bodhisatva mahāsatva practice with respect to perfection of wisdom.

The Heart Sutra begins with Avalokiteśvara, the archetype of a bodhisatva in 7th Century China, doing the practice of perfection of wisdom (prajñāpāramitācāryām caramāno) which consists of examining the five skandhas (vyavalokayati sma pañcaskandhān)

It then proceeds to describe how the bodhisatva should relate to the skandhas, in a passage that seems to resonate with the Pāḷi Cūlasuññatā Sutta. Thus the opening of the Heart Sutra is probably not arbitrary, but also relates more generally to Chapter Three of Pañcaviṃśati. The main difference being that the abstract bodhisatva has been replaced by the archetypal bodhisatva Avalokiteśvara. An obvious next step is to compare this passage in Kumārajīva's T223, which I have not had the time to do yet. And this blog post is far too long already. We can also connect this with the skandha reflection practice in the Mahāsuññatā Sutta (MN 122) which shows how one pursues the experience of emptiness, while at the same time reflecting on experience.

On final comment on this is that in Conze's translation of the Pañcaviṃśati he uses the subject divisions of the Abhisamayālaṅkāra which would have us believe that passage quoted in the Heart Sutra (1975: 61) is related somehow to the Four Noble Truths. The Heart Sutra passage covers the end of the second and beginning of the third truth. This seems to me to be a very unlikely reading of the text.

Having established the connections we need to say a few words about the introduction of deleterious changes to Buddhist texts.

How Buddhist Texts Change for the Worse

From the available evidence it appears that Buddhists constantly tinkered with their texts in large and small ways, sometimes expanding them massively as with the extrapolation of the 8,000 line text to 100,000 lines; sometimes changing a single word. We often find that successive Chinese translations of texts get longer and longer. There are many reasons why texts get amended and adapted. These are not always to do with increasing wisdom over time. Sometimes the changes are ideological. Sometimes our texts have been amended in ways that are dubious at best and catastrophic at worst. For example in the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta, sandwiched between a discussion of the four pilgrimage places and how to deal with the Tathāgata's remains is a passage about how male monks should have nothing to do with women (DN ii.140-1). It is so out of place that it jars the mind when reading the text. But for an example of poor editorial choices we can use the Heart Sutra itself to demonstrate. Take the line:

Nāvidyā nāvidyākṣayo yāvan na jarāmaraṇam na jarāmaraṇa-kṣayo.

No ignorance or end of ignorance... up to... no ageing and death, no end of ageing and death.

This is the standard list of twelve nidānas, in both the forward and reverse directions at once, with just the first and last items on the list, and using the abbreviation yāvat'as far as' to stand for the middle ten items. One could hardly get a more orthodox pan-Buddhist idea than this list. In an ideal world we'd have given the directions separately, tadyathā:

Nāvidyā yāvan na jarāmaraṇam | na jarāmaraṇa-kṣayo yāvannāvidyākṣayo

No ignorance [as a condition for the arising of volitions]... up to no ageing and death [arising on the basis of birth as a condition]. No cutting off ageing and death [through the cessation of birth] down to no cutting off ignorance [and thus putting an end to this whole mass of suffering].

Even so, the intent of the text is clear, it's about the twelve nidānas and negating them as a set, for the purpose of undermining the idea that the words are more than mere words (nāmamatra). However, some editors or scribes have failed to see the twelve nidānas here and just noticed nāvidyā (or na avidyā) 'no ignorance' and interpolated na vidyā'no knowledge' as though the point were simply to negate pairs of opposites. One of the manuscripts that does this is the Horiuzi Palm-leaf Manuscript held in Hōryūji monastery, the oldest extant Sanskrit manuscript of the Heart Sūtra. In the Horiuzi ms. this passage reads (interpolations in bold):

na vidyā nāvidyā na vidyākṣayo nāvidyāksāyo yāvan na jarāmaraṇaṃ na jarāmaraṇakṣayo

In fact here the editor has gone one step further and also interpolated na vidyākṣayo as well. It's a bizarre intervention. It's difficult to explain. This particular manuscript has been very influential, especially in Japan. For example this mistake is replicated at least twice in John Steven's book Sacred Calligraphy of the East (1995: 119, 120-1), and also in the modern Japanese Siddham script calligraphy manual, 梵字必携 (A Manual of Sanskrit Writing).

Depending on when the changes happen and how often manuscripts get copied such interventions can become the standard. In the first part of the long text Heart Sutra, the sentence in which Avalokiteśvara examines the skandhas and sees that they are empty of svabhāva ought to have two verbs: one meaning "examined" (vyavalokayati sma) and one meaning "saw" (paśyati sma). However, in the extant versions the verb paśyati sma has been replaced by a second vyavalokayati sma. This is clearly a simple error, but it must have occurred early on, because it infected all of the extant long texts, including those in Tibetan, and no copyist since has been honest or brave enough to correct it.

Similarly I've showed that the 100 Syllable Vajrasattva Mantra routinely transmitted by Tibetan lamas is garbled (Jayarava 2010). The garbled version occurs in every Tibetan source that I have consulted over many years, except the Kanjur (See Canonical Sources for the Vajrasatva Mantra). So we can say that bizarre interpolations in texts seem to be de rigueur, and mostly because some Buddhists didn't learn Sanskrit (at all or well enough), but a simple correction by someone who does know Sanskrit is almost always unwelcome because the text is "sacred" or because it would undermine the authority of the guru. Once a text has become nonsense, it seems to be resistant to being repaired, even when the repair is simple and obvious.

So the idea that someone who did not fully understand the text changing the wording in an ad hoc way that did not take the context into account and resulted in non-sense, and this bizarre intervention being accepted as authentic and transmitted faithfully, is not at all far fetched. In fact it happens all to often! We can point the finger at ancient Buddhists, but in fact the process continues. Conze's translations, for example, are full of bizarre interventions and his Sanskrit editions of grammatical errors. My first published article on the Heart Sutra (Attwood 2015) looks at a simple grammatical mistake that appears to have been overlooked by Conze, apparently because of his religious beliefs. I'm not quite sure why anyone else overlooked it, but in fact everyone did for over 60 years. A less technical (and non-paywalled) summary of this article is also available: Heart Murmurs.

When someone we admire and believe to be wise says something incomprehensible, we are predisposed to assume that the statement is profound, too profound for us to understand. Dan Sperber (2010) has called this "The Guru Effect". Sperber was largely focussed on secular contexts, living as he does in the France of post-modern philosophy which turned nonsense into an art form, to wide acclaim. Conze and many other commentators take this approach with Prajñāpāramitā. Their attitude is that the nonsense is a feature not a bug. "Of course it is illogical," they say, "if it was logical anyone could understand it and it wouldn't be profound." This kind of aberrant thinking has prevented progress being made on understanding these texts for generations.

Conclusions

This exercise has proven the value of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā-prajñāpāramitā-sūtra as a commentary on the Heart Sutra. The strategy has provided us with an important new insight into the meaning of the text. Though we still don't have the passage in the original Prakrit, locating it in the early Sanskrit Prajñāpāramitā texts gives us a better sense of the history of the ideas. Now the history the passage looks like this:

Rgs

māyopamāṃ ya iha jānati pañca skandhāṃ
na ca māya anya na ca skandha karoti anyān |

Aṣṭa

na hi bhagavan anyā sā māyā anyat tad rūpam | rūpam eva bhagavan māyā | māyaiva rūpam ||

Pañcaviṃśati

nānyad rūpam anyā śūnyatā | nānyā śūnyatā anyad rūpaṃ | rūpam eva śūnyatā | śūnyataiva rūpam ||

T223/T250

非色異空非空異色。色即是空空即是色。

Hṛdaya

rūpaṃ śūnyatā | śūnyataiva rūpaṃ | rūpān na pṛthak śūnyatā | śūnyatāyā na pṛthag rūpam ||

A fairly standard Buddhist simile—experience is like an illusion—becomes a metaphor—experience is illusion—and then given a seemingly deliberate, perhaps ideologically motivated, twist that makes it abstruse—experience is emptiness. The change left dozens of generations of Buddhists puzzling over what it could mean, caught in the "Guru Effect" trap of assuming that the text as presented was the most profound wisdom imaginable. Under these conditions the apparent lack of logic and sense is used to undermine the reader (Conze does this quite openly). This is partly because the putative author of the Heart Sutra was the perfect Buddha, who by this time can do no wrong (I explored aspects of this change in the how Buddhists understood the nature of a Buddha in Attwood 2014). The Guru Effect means that we take what are simple mistakes, and construe them as inevitably failed attempts to communicate some higher Truth. The possibility of error is axiomatically ruled out. All that is left is the failure of the reader. And some readers can turn this to their advantage by claiming to understand the incomprehensible, often through their meditative experience. Unfortunately meditation gives few insights into Sanskrit literary or grammatical traditions.

There seems to have been a simultaneous valorisation and decontextualisation of the term śūnyatā in Mahāyāna circles. If we see Aṣṭa in the light of the Pāḷi Suññatā Suttas which focus on the vimokṣa meditations, especially the signless liberation (animitta-vimokṣa) and the emptiness liberation (śūnyatā-vimokṣa) we see a strong continuity of ideas. But in Pañcaviṃśati the continuity was broken or least a good deal weaker. Śūnyatā was not longer an experience to be cultivated in meditation, but a kind of ontological absolute. The change from māyā to śūnyatā may have fitted with a developing Prajñāpāramitā ideology, but linguistically and philosophically it was a disaster because the passage could no longer be parsed linguistically or logically.

The change might have remained very obscure, except that the Pañcaviṃśati was almost as popular as the Aṣṭa and this line came to form part of the Heart Sutra, which gained popularity far outweighing its humble origins (which were also soon forgotten). Again it might have remained an obscure Chinese magical text had someone, likely Xuánzàng, translated it into Sanskrit, called it a sūtra, and re-imported it to China as an authentic Sanskrit Buddhist text. Again the context was forgotten and the Sanskrit version taken to be the ur-text. From there it took off. Generations of Buddhists, from quite early on, assumed that the obscure Chinese amulet was actually the Sanskrit essence of the superlative insights into "reality", the sarvajñā, prajñāpāramitā or mahājñāna. The fact that it was nonsense only made it seem more profound (via the Guru Effect). This left the text resistant to analysis, and each new generation of confused Buddhists went along with it for fear of being thought shallow and foolish. The willingness to submerge one's identity to the extent that one will agree to endorse something that is nonsense is a key aspect of belonging to a religious group. In modern times, the more Romantic one is, the easier this embracing of the illogical. To date the world of academia has done little to dispel the pall of foolish piety that hangs over the Heart Sutra.

Another surprising conclusion of this study is that "form is emptiness" is not in fact the be all and end all of the Heart Sutra, not the essence of the Prajñāpāramitā. The Aṣṭasāhasrikā-prajñāpāramitā makes clear that when one practices with concepts like "form is empty" in mind that this is still an error. The śūnyatā-vimokṣa samādhi is free of such concepts. If we are looking for a key line in the Heart Sutra I suggest that it is in fact sarvadharmāḥ śūnyatālakṣanāḥ 'all mental events are characterised by lack of self-existence'. This is the underlying reason that 'form' is like an illusion. It is this that opens up the discussion of what the text means and points to the profound insight that the Buddha had about the nature of experience.

We really ought to talk more about śūnyatā as one of the trivimokṣa or 'three liberations', a state in which all verbal cognition shuts down and the experience is empty of all concepts (something of this is hinted at in my discussion of SN 45.11 and 45.12 from 2008: Communicating the Dharma). Śūnyatā-vimokṣa is a condition that can be attained temporarily in meditation and as a permanent condition is synonymous with bodhi. The Cūlasuññata Sutta (MN 121) explains to some extent how one approaches this in meditation. But this is another subject that I'll have to return to.

The alternate passage in Pañcaviṃśati also sheds light on the construction of the opening passage of the Heart Sutra, at least in outline we now understand more why Avalokiteśvara makes an appearance and what he is doing. And perhaps helps to explain why Śāriputra is the interlocutor.

Finally I have tried to show that "error" has to be a possible state in any textual hermeneutic. When we read a text we have to be capable of seeing error as error. Buddhists and scholars of Buddhism are all to often blind to this possibility. The tendency, especially with respect to the Prajñāpāramitā has been to take error as "paradox" or as being a consequence of the ineffability of Reality. Notable exceptions to this criticism are Paul Harrison and Richard H Jones whose work has helped me to see errors for what they are. The refusal to see clearly means that there has been little investigation of errors in Buddhist texts. Ironically errors seem to have two main sources: unfamiliarity with our canonical languages, and deliberate alteration motivated by ideology. Sometimes both at once.

Those of us who take study seriously, eventually learn that the texts are not a true refuge. Having now written 21 essays on the text (this one is 12,000 words long) and with one published article and one in development, and having discovered a new Heart Sutra manuscript, I fancy I know a thing or two about the Heart Sutra. In the last five years I have certainly discovered things about the Heart Sutra that were previously unknown, but the main thing I've learned is that knowing it, even understanding it, is no substitute for a systematic approach to transformation. Śūnyatā is primarily an experience. On the other hand, while nonsense is a possible reading for any passage in my hermeneutic, we get nowhere by assuming that the message of our texts is intentionally illogical and thus impervious to analysis. There has to be a balance.

For me, at least, the Heart Sutra will never be the same.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Chinese Texts from the CBETA version of the Taishō. http://www.cbeta.org

Sanskrit texts from Göttingen Register of Electronic Texts in Indian Languages (Gretil) http://gretil.sub.uni-goettingen.de/

Except

Vajracchedikā-prajñāpāramitā from Harrison & Watanabe, as simplified on Bibliotecha Polyglota.
Prajñāpāramitā-ratnaguṇasaṃcaya-gāthā from Yuyama, Akira. (1976)

__________________________________________________

Attwood, Jayarava (2014) Escaping the Inescapable: Changes in Buddhist Karma. Journal of Buddhist Ethics. 21: 503-535.

Attwood, Jayarava (2015). Heart Murmurs: Some Problems with Conze’s Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya. Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies. 8: 28-48.

Conze, Edward. (1967) ‘The Prajñāpāramitā-Hṛdaya Sūtra’ in Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies: Selected Essays, Bruno Cassirer, pp. 147-167. [revised version of Conze (1948).]

Conze Edward. (1975) The Large Sutra on Perfect Wisdom: with the Divisions of the Abhisamayālaṅkāra. University of California Press.

Eckel, Malcolm David. (1987) Indian Commentaries on the Heart Sūtra: The Politics of Interpretation. The Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies. 10(2): 69-79.

Falk, Harry & Karashima, Seishi. (2012) A first‐century Prajñāpāramitā manuscript from Gandhāra - parivarta 1 (Texts from the Split Collection 1). ARIRIAB XV, 19-61. Online: https://www.academia.edu/3561115/prajnaparamita-5.

Hamilton, Sue. (2000) Early Buddhism: A New Approach. London: Routledge.

Hyun Choo, B. (2006) 'An English Translation of the Banya paramilda simgyeong chan: Wonch'uk's Commentary on the Heart Sūtra (Prajñāpāramitā-hṛdaya-sūtra)'International Journal of Buddhist Thought & Culture. February 2006, Vol.6, pp.121-205.

Jayarava (2010) The Hundred Syllable Vajrasattva Mantra. Western Buddhist Review. 5.

Jones, Richard H. (2012) The Heart of Wisdom. Jackson Square Books.

KIMURA Takayasu (2010). Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā. Vol. I-1, Tokyo: Sankibo Busshorin 2007. http://fiindolo.sub.uni-goettingen.de/gretil/1_sanskr/4_rellit/buddh/psp_1u.htm [Input by Klaus Wille, Göttingen, April 2010].

Lopez, Donald S. (1988) The Heart Sūtra Explained: Indian and Tibetan Commentaries. State University of New York Press.

Lopez, Donald S. (1996) Elaborations on Emptiness: Uses of the Heart Sutra. Princeton University Press.

Huifeng [aka Orsborn, M. B.] (2008) A Survey Of Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra Translations In Chinese. Online: http://prajnacara.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/survey-of-prajnaparamita-sutra.html.

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.

Shih, Heng-Ching & Lusthaus, Dan. (2006) A Comprehensive Commentary on the Heart Sutra (Prajnaparamita-hyrdaya-sutra). Numata Center for Buddhist Translation & Research.

Sperber, Dan. (2010) The Guru Effect. Review of Philosophy and Psychology. 1:583–592 DOI 10.1007/s13164-010-0025-0

Tanahashi, Kazuki. (2014). The Heart Sutra: A Comprehensive Guide to the Classic of Mahayana Buddhism. Shambala.

Wayman, Alex. (1984) Buddhist Insight: Essays. Motilal Banarsidass.

Yuyama, Akira. (1976) Prajñā-pāramitā-ratna-guṇa-saṃcaya-gāthā (Sanskrit Recension A). Cambridge University Press.

Zacchetti, Stefano. (2005) In Praise of the Light: A Critical Synoptic Edition with an Annotated Translation of Chapters 1-3 of Dharmarakṣa's Guang zan jing, Being the Earliest Chinese Translation of the Larger Prajñāpāramitā, Tokyo. (Bibliotheca Philologica et Philosophica Buddhica, 8). IRIAB. Sanskrit text also available from Gretil.

____________________________________________________

Although I don't cite it directly, the material on śūnyatā-vimokṣa is inspired by an essay privately circulated by my colleague Satyadhāna, which I read when most of this essay was already sketched out. That essay was a follow up to his article (which I have only skimmed so far):

Satyadhāna. (2014) The Shorter Discourse on Emptiness (Cūḷasuññatasutta, Majjhima-nikāya 121): translation and commentary. Western Buddhist Review. 6: 78–104

Satyadhāna's work seems to me to provide further keys for understanding the early Perfection of Wisdom. But in any case I'm now working on the Pāḷi material myself. A good introduction to śūnyatā in Pāḷi texts can be found in:

Anālayo. 2010. Excursions into the Thought-World of the Pāli Discourses. Pariyatti Press: 272-281

______________________________________________________

Sanskrit Aṣṭasāhasrikā Passages

Numbers in square brackets are pages in Vaidya's Edition.

1.12 [6] evamukte āyuṣmān subhūtir āyuṣmantaṃ śāriputram etad avocat – etam etad āyuṣman śāriputra evam etat | rūpam evāyuṣman śāriputra virahitaṃ rūpasvabhāvena | evaṃ vedanaiva saṃjñaiva saṃskārā eva | vijñānam evāyuṣman śāriputra virahitaṃ vijñānasvabhāvena | prajñāpāramitaiva āyuṣman śāriputra virahitā prajñāpāramitāsvabhāvena | sarvajñataiva āyuṣman śāriputra virahitā sarvajñatāsvabhāvena | prajñāpāramitālakṣaṇenāpi prajñāpāramitā virahitā | lakṣaṇa-svabhāvenāpi lakṣaṇaṃ virahitam | lakṣya-svabhāvenāpi lakṣyaṃ virahitam | svabhāva-lakṣaṇenāpi svabhāvo virahitaḥ ||

1.14. punaraparamāyuṣmān subhūtir bodhisattvaṃ mahāsattvam ārabhyaivam āha – saced rūpe carati, nimitte carati | saced rūpanimitte carati, nimitte carati | saced ‘rūpaṃ nimittam’ iti carati, nimitte carati | sa ced rūpasyotpāde carati, nimitte carati | saced rūpasya nirodhe carati, nimitte carati | saced rūpasya vināśe carati, nimitte carati | saced rūpaṃ śūnyamiti carati, nimitte carati | ahaṃ carāmīti carati, nimitte carati | ahaṃ bodhisattva iti carati, nimitte carati | ahaṃ bodhisattva iti hy upalambha eva sa carati | evaṃ saced vidanāyāṃ saṃjñāyāṃ saṃskāreṣu | saced vijñāne carati, nimitte carati | saced vijñānanimitte carati, nimitte carati sacedvijñānaṃ nimittamiti carati, nimitte carati | saced vijñānasyotpāde carati, nimitte carati | saced vijñānasya nirodhe carati, nimitte carati | saced vijñānasya vināśe carati, nimitte carati | saced vijñānaṃ śūnyamiti carati, nimitte carati | ahaṃ carāmīti carati, nimitte carati | ahaṃ bodhisattva iti carati, nimitte carati | ahaṃ bodhisattva iti hy upalambha eva sa carati| sacet punarasyaivaṃ bhavati - ya evaṃ carati, sa prajñāpāramitāyāṃ carati, sa prajñāpāramitāṃ bhāvayatīti, nimitta eva sa carati | ayaṃ bodhisattvo 'nupāyakuśalo veditavyaḥ ||

1.22 atha khalvāyuṣmān subhūtir bhagavantam etada vocat - yo bhagavan evaṃ paripṛcchet - kimayaṃ māyāpuruṣāḥ sarvajñatāyāṃ śikṣiṣyate, sarvajñatāyā āsannībhaviṣyati, sarvajñatāyāṃ niryāsyatīti? tasya bhagavan evaṃ paripṛcchataḥ kathaṃ nirdeṣṭavyaṃ syāt? evamukte bhagavānāyuṣmantaṃ subhūtimetadavocat - tena hi subhūte tvāmevātra pratiprakṣyāmi / yathā te kṣamate, tathā vyākuryāḥ / sādhu bhagavannityāyuṣmān subhūtirbhagavataḥ pratyaśrauṣīt / bhagavānetadavocat - tatkiṃ manyase subhūte anyā sā māyā, anyattadrūpam, anyā sā māyā, anyā sā vedanā / anyā sā saṃjñā, anye te saṃskārāḥ / anyā sā māyā, anyattadvijñānam? subhūtirāha - na hyetadbhagavan / na hi bhagavan anyā sā māyā anyattadrūpam / rūpameva bhagavan māyā, māyaiva rūpam / na hi bhagavan anyā sā māyā anyā sā vedanā, anyā sā saṃjñā anye te saṃskārāḥ / vedanā saṃjñā [9] saṃskārā eva bhagavan māyā, māyaiva vedanāsaṃjñāsaṃskārāḥ / na bhagavan anyā sā māyā anyattadvijñānam / vijñānameva bhagavan māyā, māyaiva vijñānam //

15.2 iha subhūte bodhisattvā mahāsattvā anuttarāṃ samyaksaṃbodhimabhisaṃbuddhāḥ santo lokasya ākāśagatikaṃ rupamiti dharmaṃ deśayanti / evaṃ vedanā saṃjñā saṃskārāḥ / evameva subhūte sarvadharmā ākāśagatikā anāgatikā agatikā ākāśasamāḥ / yathā ākāśam anāgatam agatam akṛtam avikṛtam anabhisaṃskṛtam, asthitam asaṃsthitam avyavasthitam , anutpannam aniruddham, evameva subhūte sarvadharmā anāgatā āgatā ākṛtā avikṛtā anabhisaṃskṛtā asthitā asaṃsthitā avyavasthitā anutpannā aniruddhā ākāśakalpatvādavikalpāḥ / tatkasya hetoḥ? yā subhūte rūpasya śūnyatā, na sā āgacchati vā gacchati vā / evaṃ vedanāyāḥ saṃjñāyāḥ saṃskārāṇām / yā subhūte vijñānasya śūnyatā, na sā āgacchati vā gacchati vā / evameva subhūte yā sarvadharmāṇāṃ śūnyatā, na sā āgacchati vā gacchati vā / tatkasya hetoḥ? śūnyatāgatikā hi subhūte sarvadharmāḥ / te tāṃ gatiṃ na vyativartante /[148]

Sanskrit Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Passage.

Gligit ms. folio 17 recto - 17 verso.

tathā hi sa bodhisatvo nāma svabhāvena śunyaḥ na śunyatayā rūpaṃ śunyaṃ na vedanā saṃjñā saṃskārā na śunyatayā vijñānaṃ śunyam nānyatra rūpāc chunyatā nānyatra vedanāyāḥ saṃjñāyāḥ saṃskārebhyo nānyatra vijñānāc chunyatā | śunyataiva rūpaṃ śunyataiva vedanā saṃjñā saṃskārāḥ śunyataiva vijñānaṃ (Gilgit 17v) tat kasya hetoḥ | tathā hi nāmamātram idaṃ yad uta bodhiḥ nāmamātram idaṃ yad uta bodhisatvaḥ nāmamātram idaṃ yad uta cchunyatā | nāmamātram idaṃ yad uta rūpaṃ vedanā saṃjñā saṃskārā vijñānaṃ | tathā hi māyopamaṃ rūpam vedanā saṃjñā saṃskārā māyopamaṃ vijñānaṃ māyā ca nāmamātraṃ na deśasthā na pradeśasthā: asad abhūtaṃ vitathasamaṃ māyādarśanaṃ svabhāvarahitaṃ asvabhāvaś cānutpādaḥ anirodaḥ na hānir na vṛddhiḥ na saṃkleśo na vyavadānam

Modern distribution of
Indian languages

In this essay I will reiterate some important points made by Michael Witzel about the linguistic history of India. When the first anatomically modern humans reached India ca. 70,000 years ago they almost certainly used language. But all the direct evidence for language is much more recent, the oldest being written forms of language. Comparative linguistics allows us infer a great deal more about the history of language so that we can get a picture of how people spoke long before writing was even invented.

Like many historians I use the term India, or sometimes Greater India, to mean then whole of the sub-continent, taking in the political territories of modern day Pakistan, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. Given that the main languages of North India and Sri Lanka are all modern Indic Languages: Urdu, Panjabi, Hindi, Bihari, Bengali, Nepali, and Sinhala, the modern political divisions belie the common linguistic history they share. However we must be a little cautious. Language, ethnicity, and geography can be independent variables when discussing culture. This essay mainly concerns languages and the speakers of languages. We cannot be sure of the ethnicity of these people.

We know with some certainty that the speakers of Old Indic languages (now represented only by Vedic) came from outside India. This is an unpopular thesis amongst Indian Nationalists who try to make a case for Sanskrit arising in India and spreading out. Some would have us believe it is the original language (Cf Eco 1997). However the relationship of Old Indic with Old Iranian and a variety of other internal evidence show that Indo-Iranian -- an early offshoot from Proto-Indo-European that further split into two sub-families, Iranian and Indic -- was spoken by nomadic peoples of the Southern Central Asia. Old Indic is mostly distinguished from Old Iranian by a few sound changes. Later grammatical forms drifted apart as well, though the attested languages, Vedic and Avestan, were closely related.

Comparative linguists showed in the late 18th century that Greek, Latin and Sanskrit are all so similar that they must have derived from a common ancestor. That hypothetical languages is nowadays called Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and the language family that it spawned is called Indo-European (IE). PIE also has a Germanic branch giving rise to all the Germanic languages (including English), a Slavonic branch incorporating all the Slavic languages, and takes in many of the languages of Iran and Afghanistan, not to mention Armenian. In addition we have written evidence of a number of now dead Indo-European languages such as Tocharian and Khotanese from Central Asia. By comparing the changes in many languages, linguists are able to describe pragmatic 'rules' which describe how sounds and forms of words change. This procedure has been very successful in some areas. PIE is probably the best example. But the Sino-Tibetan language family also gives a clear view of the proto language that underlies them all.

There have been efforts of varying success to try to cover all the languages of the world in this way. And this has naturally lead some scholars to propose a further ancient layer of relatedness. So for example there is the conjectured Nostratic proto-language (or macro-family) that takes in Afroasiatic (including the Semitic languages), Kartvelian (Caucasian languages and possibly Basque), Indo-European, Uralic (including Finno-Ugric), Dravidian, Altaic (covering the Turkish, Central Asian, and probably Korean and Japanese), and Eskimo–Aleut. These macro-families are still controversial, though many of the objections are ideological rather than logical.

A major branch of the PIE family is Indo-Iranian taking in languages that were spoken throughout the combined sphere of influence of Persia and India, taking in large swathes of Central Asia. In this essay I will refer to the Indian branch of the PIE or Indo-Iranian as Indic. It has previously referred to as Aryan or Indo-Aryan but these terms have been deprecated because of the racial overtones of the word aryan and the discrediting of old ideas about race. Indic is strictly a linguistic term that gives us no information about ethnicity. We can talk about three phases of Indic: Old - principally attested as Vedic though other variations must have existed (before ca. 500 BCE); Middle - attested by Pāḷi, Gāndhārī, and Apabramsa (ca 500 BCE - 1000 CE); and New or Modern (emerging in the last millennia).

When the speakers of Old Indic crossed the Hindu Kush and entered India, ca 1700-1500 BCE, they met people who spoke languages with a much longer history in Greater India.

There is a whole family of Dravidian languages for example, including Tamil, Telegu, Malayalam, and Kannada. Today the people who speak languages from the Dravidian family are a large minority (about 20%). Some linguists (eg. McAlpin 1974, 1975, 1981) have noted a similarity between Dravidian and the language spoken in ancient Elam, near what is now the border of Iran and Iraq on the Red Sea. Written records of Elamite stretch back to 3000 BCE. McAlpin et al believe that Dravidian speakers split off from Elamite speakers and entered Indian very early, perhaps 4000 BC. Others are more doubtful (Blench 2008), dismissing the evidence for flimsy and pointing out affiliations with other language groups as well.

Less well known is the Austroasiatic family. This family of languages extends from the North-east of India to Vietnam. One Indian branch of this widely geographically spread out family, is Munda, with several languages spoken in small pockets of India today, but probably more widespread in the past. In Burma there is a strong overlay of Tibeto-Burman languages that descended from the north, but there are still enclaves of Austroasiatic speakers as well. Genetic studies of Austroasiatic speakers suggest that the Austroasiatic language family may have arisen in India and spread east.

Additionally there are a number of languages in India that appear to be unrelated to any known languages. These language isolates, as they are called, are found in the so-called tribal peoples who seem never to have been assimilated into the mainstream of Indian culture (in other words they were never Brahmanised).

Michael Witzel's exploration of the linguistic history of India begins by establishing his parameters, most important for the purposes of this essay is the periods of composition of the Ṛgveda (1999: 3).

I. The early Ṛgvedic period: c. 1700–1500 BCE: books (maṇḍala) 4, 5, 6, and maybe book 2, with the early hymns referring to the Yadu-Turvaśa, Anu-Druhyu tribes;
II. The middle (main) Ṛgvedic period, c. 1500–1350 BCE: books 3, 7, 8. 1–66 and 1.51–191; with a focus on the Bharata chieftain Sudās and his ancestors, and his rivals, notably Trasadasyu, of the closely related Pūru tribe.
III. The late Ṛgvedic period, c. 1350–1200 BCE: books 1.1–50, 8.67–103, 10.1–854; 10.85–191: with the descendant of the Pūru chieftain Trasadasyu, Kuruśravana, and the emergence of the super-tribe of the Kuru (under the post-RV Parikṣit).

These layers of composition have been established on the basis of "internal criteria of textual arrangement, of the ‘royal’ lineages, and independently from these, those of the poets (ṛṣis) who composed the hymns. About both groups of persons we know enough to be able to establish pedigrees which sustain each other." (1999: 3).

Dutch Indologist, F. B. J. Kuiper, had already identified some 383 words in the Ṛgveda that are not Indic and must be loan words from another language family. We know this because they break the phonetic rules of Indic languages. We can use an example from English to demonstrate this. We have a word ptolemaic, which comes from the Egyptian name Ptolemy. It refers to a particular view of the world as earth-centred. Now we know that ptolemaic cannot be a native English word because English words cannot start with /pt/, and indeed native English speakers cannot easily pronounce this sound combination and tend to just say /t/. It is clues like this that linguists use to identify loan words. And we have to take into account that loan words are often naturalised. Many loans words in English are Anglicized. So another loan word like chocolate has been altered to fit English spelling patterns from an original spelling more like xocolātl, which clearly breaks English phonetic rules. We also have a number of Yiddish loan words like shlemiel, shlep, shlock, shmaltz, shmuck, and shnoozle, etc, that defy, but also to some extent redefine English spelling. Similarly no other Indic language has retroflex consonants (ṭ, ṭh, ḍ, ḍh, ṇ, ṣ), but Old Indic absorbed these from languages it met in India and they became a naturalised aspect of the Indic phonology by the time the Ṛgveda was composed.

It's not always possible to identify where a loan word has come from. But Kuiper and Witzel manage to identify most of the 300 words as belonging to Proto-Dravidian or Proto-Munda, with a few from other language families like Tibeto-Burman.

Perhaps the most striking finding that Witzel gives, repeatedly in his essay, is that in the early Ṛgvedic period there are no loan words from Dravidian, e.g.

"It is important to note that RV level I has no Dravidian loan words at all (details, below § 1.6); they begin to appear only in RV level II and III." (Witzel 1999: 6)

Ṛgvedic loans from Drav[idian] are visible, but they also are now datable only to middle and late Ṛgvedic (in the Greater Panjab), and they can both the localized and dated for the Post-Ṛgvedic texts. (Witzel 1999: 19)

This is an important finding. The landscape of the Ṛgveda is that of modern day Panjab. This is clear, for example, from the names of rivers that are mentioned, e.g. the Kabul, Indus, Sarasvati (now dried up) and Yamuna rivers.

Loan words from the earliest period are from the Austroasiatic language family, meaning that the people living in this area when the Vedic speakers arrived, spoke a variety of proto-Munda. This is important because it is believed that the people living in this area were the descendants of the collapsed Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC). They had scattered as the climate became much drier and caused their large scale cities to be unlivable. The IVC had disappeared by 1700 BCE. If the people of the Panjab ca 1500 BCE spoke a variety of proto-Munda, this strongly suggests that the people of the IVC also spoke an Austroasiatic language, rather than is usually supposed, a Dravidian on even Indic language. Indian nationalists often assume that the IVC spoke Sanskrit, but this was never plausible. Interestingly the very name we have for the north of this region, Gandhāra, is itself an Austroasiatic loan word.

It's often suggested that because there are northern pockets of Dravidian speakers, with whom the Vedic speakers presumably interacted, that Dravidian was once considerably more widespread and perhaps that the language of the IVC was Dravidian. The loan words in the Ṛgveda argue against this view. The north-western pockets of Dravidian could be isolated populations left behind by the migration of Dravidian speakers into Southern India from Mesopotamia. Those in the North-East are more consistent with a previously larger territory, but if they were ever on the Ganges Plain they were forced out of it completely, leaving remnant populations only as far north as mountain ranges on the southern edge of the Ganges Valley.

Conclusion

The picture that emerges is that Old Indic speaking people crossed the Hindu Kush in small numbers and met people who spoke a form of proto-Austroasiatic; and then later, perhaps as they penetrated further into the sub-continent, people who spoke proto-Dravidian languages. The Dravidian speakers, themselves probably immigrants had lived in India for some thousands of years already, displacing and assimilating even earlier waves of human migrants. The pockets of people who speak language isolates, not related to any known language, have presumably lived in India for a very long time. Indeed they often pursue a hunter-gatherer lifestyle that reinforces this impression.

Other authors have suggested that the Old Indic speakers had the advantage of superior technology and this led them to dominate the original inhabitants. We can't really know how it happened at this distant time, but in any case Indic languages came to dominate the North of India - from Afghanistan to the Ganges Delta. Again it is worth repeating that language, culture, and location may not be correlated. To the extent that we can make comparisons, there were a few surviving similarities between the people who composed the Ṛgveda and those who composed the Avesta. But in many respects their cultures had diverged along with their languages. Zoroastrianism was the major innovation in Iran, although the dates of the founder are difficult to pin down, the most likely scenario places him a little after the Ṛgveda. Based on informal comments by Michael Witzel, I have argued for an trickle of Iranian tribes entering India ca. 1000-800 BCE, who ended up settling on the margins of the Central Ganges city states of the second urbanisation, especially Kosala and Magadha (Attwood 2012). Genetic studies suggest that though their language came to be spoken throughout the Panjab and down into the Ganges Valley, that the Vedic speakers contributed little to the gene pool, which is remarkably homogeneous in India. The genetic contribution is far less striking than we might imagine by patterns of culture or language family (Attwood 2012).

This poses a difficulty for Indian Nationalists who want Sanskrit to be the mother tongue of India (I'm not sure how they fit Dravidian into the picture) and for it to have originated within the subcontinent. People with this view often express their hatred of Michael Witzel, referring to him in extremely uncomplimentary terms. But as rational people we have to follow the evidence and allow it to guide us to conclusions, even when these are uncomfortable for us. And the evidence is abundantly clear in this case. If any language is the mother tongue then it is probably Proto-Austroasiatic, the ancestor of the modern Munda and Austroasiatic languages. Sanskrit developed from Indo-Iranian, initially somewhere in Greater Iran, then was carried into India with Vedic speaking migrants. Since we know they were nomadic cattle herders (unlike, say, the Śākyas who were settled agriculturalists) they may have made the journey up the Khyber Pass seeking greener pastures.

In Attwood (2012) I tried to show that certain important features of early Indian Buddhist culture could be tied to Zoroastrianism and/or Iran. Unfortunately all too often the history of the region is divided into Indian and Iranian by academics. And thus I fear that many connections between the two regions have been overlooked. The connections that are evident seem to demand more attention from suitably qualified scholars. We know a great deal about the interactions of Greece and Persia, but far too little about relations between Persia and India.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Attwood, Jayarava. (2012) Possible Iranian Origins for Sākyas and Aspects of Buddhism. Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies. 3.

Blench, Roger (2008) Re-evaluating the linguistic prehistory of South Asia. Toshiki OSADA and Akinori UESUGI eds. 2008. Occasional Paper 3: Linguistics, Archaeology and the Human Past. pp. 159-178. Kyoto: Indus Project, Research Institute for Humanity and Nature.

Eco, Umberto. (1997) The Search for the Perfect Language. London: Fontana Press.

McAlpin, David W. (1974) Toward Proto-Elamo-Dravidian. Language 50: 89-101.

McAlpin, David W. (1975) Elamite and Dravidian: Further Evidence of Relationship. Current Anthropology 16: 105-115.

McAlpin, David W. (1981) Proto Elamo Dravidian: The Evidence and Its Implications. American Philosophy Society.

Witzel, Michael. (1999) Substrate Languages in Old Indo-Aryan: Ṛgvedic, Middle and Late Vedic. Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies. 5(1): 1–67.

Plausible?

This essay summarises and explores some idea from Justin L. Barrett's short but important and influential book Why Would Anyone Believe in God? (2004). Barrett's book is not simply an account of the psychology of theism in evolutionary terms, but goes into the evolutionary origins of religious beliefs more generally. He identifies several cognitive processes or functions that contribute to religious style thinking and locates them within a social and psychological context that lends religious concepts plausibility for the individual. We will focus here on Barrett's ideas on the plausibility of religious beliefs, which I will apply to the two beliefs central to the Buddhist religion: karma and rebirth.

Barrett's work forms a cornerstone of my understanding of the psychology of religious belief. In my view, belief in just world virtually entails belief in an afterlife in order to balance out all the blatant unfairness and immorality (unrewarded goodness and unpunished wickedness) that we see around us. All religious afterlife beliefs are basically the same in that they amount to a post-mortem balancing of the moral books, whether this happens in one go, or through repeated rebirth, or reincarnation. Buddhism combines both of these two basic approaches: rebirth, unless one does something about it, and liberation from rebirth, if one has done what needed to be done (kataṃ karaṇīyaṃ). The afterlife is attractive anyway because the fact of inescapable death is so disturbing to a living being. Additionally an afterlife is made to seem plausible by phenomena such as the so-called out-of-body experiences, and many kinds of meditative experience, which seem to point to disembodied mind (ontological dualism). Combined, these factors suggest how religious beliefs, particular beliefs about universal morality and an afterlife, arose and became so ubiquitous in human cultures. Karma is our Buddhist myth of a just world, and rebirth is our myth of the afterlife required to allow fairness to play out. There are more and less sophisticated versions of these two myths, they all share these basic features.

However, we no longer live in traditional societies. We live in post-Enlightenment societies in which technological marvels are routine. When I was a child, ideas like video phones, personal communication devices, powerful personal computers, a universal repository of knowledge, automatic translation, and so on were the stuff of science fiction. Now, they are all rolled into one small handheld device. Science has transformed our understanding of the world: theories such as evolution, plate tectonics, relativity, classical & quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, genetics, bacterial-pathogenesis, are not incidental or trivial. They are powerful explanatory paradigms that accurately predict the behaviour of the world at different scales, even when, as with relativity and quantum mechanics we know the theories to be incomplete. In large measure the Ptolemaic/Christian worldview, with its false presuppositions and superstitions, has been superseded in Europe and its (former) colonies. Why then do religious beliefs continue to seem plausible to so many people, even outside the confines of classical organised religion? Why do some people abandon the superstitions of Christianity only to embrace the superstitions of Buddhism? We can situate this question inside of the larger question that Barrett addresses about why other kinds of religious belief, particularly belief in gods, persist into the modern era and to resist incursions by new knowledge about the world.

Evolutionary Psychology & Mental Tools

Barrett's viewpoint comes under the rubric of Evolutionary Psychology. The basic idea is that the brain, and therefore the mind, is modular and these modules evolved and bestowed fitness (in the special sense meant by geneticists) on homo sapiens as a whole. For many years now neuroscientists have noticed that damage to certain parts of the brain produce a deficit in the functioning of the mind. For example damage to the occipital lobe of the brain affects vision in variety of ways. I've often cited Hannah and Antonio Damasio's work on injuries in the ventro-medial-prefrontal cortex and how they affect decision making (see Facts and Feelings).

A recent article by Alfredo Ardila (2015) highlights this approach in a very interesting way. When we lose the ability to speak it's called aphasia. There are two kinds of aphasia due to brain damage: Wernicke's-type, associated with brain damage in the temporal lobe, and Broca's-type associated with damage in the frontal-subcortical region. Wernicke's aphasia affects the lexical/semantic aspects of language, while Broca's affects grammar. This suggests that the two aspects of language evolved separately, i.e. that we have one language module that deals with words, and another that deals with how words fit together to make sentences. Ardila proposes a staged evolution of language in which animal style communication evolved very early; it was followed by a gradual build up of verbal signs for things or actions in hominids as our cognitive capacity increased. Only with the advent of anatomically modern humans did we begin to use grammar to create strings of words with distinctions between nouns and verbs, and so on. This is consistent with Robin Dunbar's outline of the evolution of brain capacity and social group size and the theory of language evolution that he proposes (Dunbar 2014; see also When Did Language Evolve?).

There are some vigorous critiques of the modular theory of Evolutionary Psychology, but it seems incontrovertible that the brain is divided into functional areas with different tasks and that it must have evolved to be that way. Sometimes another part of the brain can take over the function following an accident, especially in young people. There are of course the curious cases where people grow up with vastly reduced brain volumes due, for example, to childhood hydrocephalus, but have apparently normal brain function. In these cases brain volume can be as little as 5%-10% of typical. The reduction in volume has to happen early in life, and it's not clear how the number of neurons is affected (might their be the same number squeezed into a much smaller volume?). We also see people with severe epilepsy surviving radical brain surgery, where have the neocortex is removed, but again that part of the brain has been disabled from an early age and the brain has adapted to work around it. Mostly brain damage, in adults at least, results in permanent dysfunction. Whether this physical modularity translates into more abstract 'mental tools' of the kind that Barrett talks about, is moot, but it seems plausible.

A caveat to be aware of is that while science journalists like to see these areas in the brain as operating in isolation—witness the brouhaha about the so-called "God spot" (now refuted)—in fact the whole brain is active all the time, the whole brain is involved in producing experience and directing our activities. Some areas clearly do perform specific tasks, but they do so as participants in a system, and often a system within a system. And not only do we have to keep the whole brain in mind, we have to see the brain as situated in a body that also contributes to experience through the peripheral nervous system and sensory organs. Recently David Chapman and I discussed this issue and he argued that we need to acknowledge that cognition has a social dimension as well. I'm sympathetic to this view, it's consistent, for example, with Mercier and Sperber's Argumentative Theory of Reasoning, with Robin Dunbar's Social Brain Hypothesis, and other more systemic ways of thinking about life, but it takes us beyond the scope of Barrett's work and Chapman himself has yet to commit his ideas to writing (nudge, nudge). However once, I've spelt out this part of my psychology of belief, the obvious next step would be to attempt some kind of synthesis.

Barrett outlines some different types of mental tool. Some categorise sensory information, into objects, agents, or faces, for example; whereas others describe such objects once they are detected. Barrett highlights what he calls the "Agent Detection Device" (ADD) in his writing. This is the function of the brain that allows us to distinguish an object that is an agent, from one which is not: a rat from a rock; a snake from a branch. Ordinary objects in particular follow rules of movement that are bound by the laws of physics: a bird moves differently than a missile. We have an intuitive sense of the different ways that agents move compared to non-agents. An important agent describer is known as Theory of Mind (ToM). Having recognised an object as something that initiates its own actions, the ToM attributes to it a host of mental properties suitable to an agent. For example, agents have motivations or desires that set them in motion (emotion; from Latin ex-'out' + movere'to move'); they act to achieve goals; and so on. Understanding this allows us to interact creatively with agents in a way that is not required with non-agent objects and that enhances survival (e.g. trapping animal food or avoiding predators). As we will see, the ADD and ToM are central to Barrett's understanding of belief in gods.

In Barrett's theory, the mind is furnished with many categorising and describing tools which operate unconsciously and impose structure and order on our perceptions so that we can make sense of them. What we actually become aware of, out of the vast array of sensory inputs, is the product of considerable real-time processing that shapes how we perceive the world.

Beliefs

Barrett identifies two kinds of belief: reflective and non-reflective. He argues that most beliefs are of the non-reflective kind. They arise from assumptions about the way the world works, automatically generated by the unconscious functioning of our various mental tools (especially categorisers and describers). We often don't even think about non-reflective beliefs, to the point where we may not know that we have a belief. And non-reflective beliefs are transparent to us, which is to say that we are not aware of the process by which we come to have a non-reflective belief. These are simply the beliefs that we deduce from interacting physically with the world and unconsciously assimilate from our family, peers, and society.

Barrett does not say anything about a relationship between non-reflective beliefs and Kant's idea of a priori judgements, but the similarity is noticeable. Non-reflective beliefs, in Barrett's view, encompass physical facts such as the belief that an object in motion will continue along its inertial path, objects fall under the force of gravity unless supported, or that physical objects cannot pass through one another. Such beliefs emerge, at least in part, through experience, which is then reflected in the way language works (See Lakoff & Johnson). So such beliefs are a priori, in the sense that they are prior to information arriving in conscious awareness and the process of forming them is transparent to us and therefore out of our control. We cannot help but understand experience in terms of our non-reflective beliefs. This certainly seems to correlate with Kant's idea of a priori judgements.

Reflective beliefs are the kind that we learn or decide for ourselves after consciously assessing the available information and making a decision. According to my own understanding (see Facts and Feelings, 25 May 2012), decision making involves weighing the merit of various bits of information. The salience of information is assessed by the emotions we associate with them. Thus my understanding is not that these reflective beliefs are "rational" in the old sense of that word. Contrarily such beliefs may well seem "intuitive", or "feel right" and this may be more important than other assessments of value. Given recent observations on the process of reasoning (See An Argumentative Theory of Reason) we need to be a bit cautious in how we understand the idea of "reasoned beliefs". Individual humans are quite bad at reasoning tasks, falling easily into dozens of logical fallacies and cognitive biases (including several dozen memory biases). If a misconception is repeated often enough it can come to seem the right thing through sheer familiarity (politicians and advertisers rely on this fact). Reason and rationality have to be see in this light, though Barrett was not writing with these ideas in mind.

There's nothing about reflective or non-reflective beliefs that guarantees accuracy or truth, nothing that guarantees that we when act on them they will produce expected results. However I would add that the kinds of non-reflective beliefs that describe the way objects move, for example, are so reliable a guide to results that we need never question them, unless perhaps we are sent into space where gravity is so much weaker that we must learn a whole new set of reflexes. Non-reflective beliefs serve the purpose of unconsciously directing our actions in ways that help us to survive. As long as the subsequent behaviour has survival value, evolution doesn't care what the belief is or whether it is true. Survival value is the primary value of the system that causes us to form beliefs. Truth is optional.

Distinguishing these two types of belief is important for Barrett's theory. He's going to argue that reflective religious beliefs, such as the belief in God, rely heavily on non-reflective beliefs. He notes that when tested with plenty of time, people give good accounts of their reflective beliefs. But put under time pressure they tend to fall back on non-reflective beliefs. So for example when describing God at leisure, people are consistent with mainstream theology. God is able to be everywhere at once (omnipresence), to read minds, to know without seeing (omniscience) and so forth. But under time pressure the same people were more likely to attribute human limitations to God, such as having only one location in space, not always aware of our motivations, and needing to see in order to know.

"People seem to have difficulty maintaining the integrity of their reflective theological concepts in rapid, real-time problem solving because of processing demands (11)

The relationship between reflective and non-reflective beliefs in complex. Barrett identifies three major ways in which they are related.

1. Non-reflective beliefs may as a defaults for reflective beliefs. For example, handed an unfamiliar object and asked if we think it will fall when held up and released, our non-reflective understanding of how the world works will inform our answer in the affirmative. Barrett's other example in this category involves a girl stealing apples. Non-reflective belief, drawing on our mental tools for describing agents in the relation to food, lead us to unconsciously conclude that she is hungry. But perhaps we also recall that the girl earlier mentioned a horse that will allow you to pet it in return for apples. In this case we might choose the alternative hypothesis that the girl is bribing the horse with apples in order to pet it. Non-reflective beliefs also form our views about the horse as agent in relation to food, but having two options means we must reflect on the possibilities. In this case may rule out the default option (girl is hungry) but non-reflective beliefs still provide the default.

Something Barrett does not comment on here, but which he might have, is the phenomenon of the Attribution Fallacy. Social Psychologists note that we assign motives to agents, but that we almost always assign internal motives without reference to external circumstances: we understand agents to be preferentially motivated by internal considerations. If a girl is taking apples without asking, breaking established norms, then we typically assume she's doing so deliberately and knowingly, i.e. that she is stealing the apples (a moral judgement); that she is therefore "a bad girl". Walk along a British high street for five minutes and you're bound to hear a parent shout (or indeed scream) "naughty!" at their small child. And given the inconsistency with which the word is used, that children cannot help by grow up confused about what "naughty" means (leaving aside the etymology!). Barrett's example suggesting that we might conclude that the girl is hungry is charitable at best, and perhaps a little naive. Maybe if it were only one apple. If we witness repeated unauthorised taking, our conclusion tends towards moral judgement. What we do not do is cast around for other reasons. For example the girl may be suffering from peer pressure to steal apples, bending to the will of older peers, or trying to impress them in order to fit in. Or she may be trying to get attention from parents distracted by their marriage break up. These may be mitigating factors once our judgement is formed, but our judgement says that the responsibility still lies with the girl (or if she is very young with her parents). We tend to assume that wrong deed is carried out due to bad motivations, whatever else might be true. Even if we understand the actions of other agents through introspection - for example, by speculating what might motivate us to act in that way - we still do not seem to take environmental factors into account, but simply project our own emotions onto the agent.

In this sense the case for non-reflective beliefs being our default seems to me to be rather stronger than Barrett suggests. This could also be why first impressions are so hard to shift. First impressions are based solely on non-reflective beliefs. In the next part we will consider more closely the kind of non-reflective beliefs that make karma and rebirth seem plausible as reflective beliefs to many Buddhists.

2. Non-reflective beliefs make reflective beliefs seem more plausible. When our reflective beliefs coincide with the non-reflective beliefs generated by the mental tools that unconsciously describe the world, then there is a sense that the belief is more reasonable. When this happens we may say that it seems "intuitively right" or perhaps that it "feels right". This sense of rightness may be difficult to explain, since it is based on how well a reflective belief fits with our non-reflective beliefs (which are transparent and frequently unconscious).

In physics, classical mechanics largely coincides with non-reflective belief. Classical mechanics largely describes the world we can see with our eyes and thus any mathematical expressions are likely to be intuitive (to feel right). Relativity is somewhat counter-intuitive because it involves unimaginably large magnitudes of velocity, mass, and length, and tells us that time is relative to the frame of reference. Quantum mechanics by contrast, the description of the behaviour of subatomic particles, describes a world that no one can see or even imagine, and as a result is deeply counter-intuitive. Sometimes even scientists will refer to this as "quantum weirdness".

What seems intuitive, by which in Barrett's terms we mean "that which our non-reflective beliefs make plausible" is a very significant aspect of religious belief. For example, consider the passage I have often cited from Thomas Metzinger's book The Ego Tunnel.

"For anyone who actually had [an out of body experience] it is almost impossible not to become an ontological dualist afterwards. In all their realism, cognitive clarity and general coherence, these phenomenal experiences almost inevitably lead the experiencing subject to conclude that conscious experience can, as a matter of fact, take place independently of the brain and body." (p.78)

Many of us, especially those who meditate, have experiences that lead us towards ontological dualism. One of the great meditation practitioners and teachers I have known makes exactly this point, i.e. that his meditative experience makes it seem incontrovertible to him that cognition is not tied to the body. It is this kind of non-reflective dualism, based on the "realism, cognitive clarity and general coherence" of these types of experience, in which our mind appears to be distinct from our body, which makes religious ideas (spirits, afterlife, gods) more plausible. Experience causes us to form non-reflective beliefs (e.g. mind/body dualism) that make our reflective beliefs (e.g. rebirth) seem more plausible. For many Buddhists, for example, rebirth is quite intuitive, quite an obvious proposition. It seems naturally plausible. Our non-reflective beliefs about the nature of our minds, the possibility of mental activity without a body, and the powerful desire for continuity combine to make a reflective belief in rebirth seem plausible and likely. Of course that a view seems plausible, even when the majority think so, does not make it true. It's not even a valid criteria for judging the truth of the belief.

But Barrett missed out something important here. yes, non-reflective beliefs do make reflective beliefs seem plausible, but the flipside of this is that they also make some of them seem more implausible. Most people, of whatever faith, find an afterlife plausible. The new annihilationists who rest their reflective beliefs on science are historically unusual, and their beliefs are powerfully counter-intuitive to most people. This is a large part of why supernatural beliefs persist despite progress in science; and why, despite regular debunking, people with "psychic powers" are still able to draw crowds and make a lot of money. And why people can read detailed explanations of why an afterlife is implausible and just write it off without a second thought. One Reddit commentator took one look at my essay There is No Life After Death, Sorry and said:

"I consider this article completely and fundamentally false. The author is fairly clearly a materialist, but he does not succeed in proving anything, here." (Reddit /r/Buddhism)

But when pressed the commenter concedes that they didn't really read the essay. The title conflicts so drastically with their non-reflective beliefs that without a considerable act of will they come to the inevitable conclusion that I am wrong without reading body of the essay. And rejecting my argument without ever having carefully considered it seems a reasonable stance. In effect it is demanded by their non-reflective beliefs. This is all too common amongst Buddhists, who ironically tend to have a very high opinion of themselves with respect to rejecting blind faith.

Important in Barrett's theory is that the lending of plausibility to concepts is not simply a passive process. Because these non-reflective beliefs are actively involved in processing the information that is presented to our conscious minds. Therefore the third way that the two kinds of belief interact is:

3. Non-reflective beliefs shape memories and experiences. Our minds are actively involved in perception. It's not that we have a perception and then interpret it. In fact interpretation and perception are simultaneous processes. In Buddhist terms the processes that go into making up experience, the five skandhas, work together simultaneously to produce an experience. What presents itself to our conscious mind is partly the product of our non-reflective beliefs. This is true also of memories. Everything that we become aware of is being filtered through our system of producing non-reflective beliefs. Again we see the parallel with Kant's a priori judgements. There is no experience that is not understood through our pre-existing beliefs about the world, including such "metaphysical" notions as space, time, and causality. But again this process is transparent, so that we do not realise that what reaches awareness is already a compromise.

Non-reflective beliefs, along with memories of past experiences, are the standard against which we judge all other beliefs. A conclusion that is consistent with a larger number of non-reflective beliefs, is (unconsciously) judged more plausible and is thus more likely to become a reflective belief. The process by which this happens "often amounts to a crude heuristic" (15). Although Barrett's description of this process is evocative, I think Damasio has identified more accurately how this process works. Damasio (2006) describes a process involving emotional weighting of facts to determine their "salience" (See Facts and Feelings). By scanning our emotional response to certain conclusions we can evaluate many possibilities at once and come to a conclusion quickly and unconsciously. Even reasoning seems to involve this process of assessing the salience of information through how we feel about it. Because the decision making process works by integrating emotional responses, it is effectively able to assess many possibilities at once and present the preferred option (the one we feel best about) to our conscious mind quickly, but transparently. We then find reasons to justify our decision.

A fascinating example of this surfaced, as I was writing this essay, from the blog of Joseph LeDoux, the world's leading expert on the neurophysiology of emotions, especially fear. His published work on the amygdala stated that damage to the amygdala weakens the ability to assess threats and of course one of the most accessible aspects of our response to threats is the feeling of fear. But this was taken to mean that the amygdala caused fear. This is an example of the fallacy that correlation equals causation, we actually alter what we read or hear so that it fits our preconceptions. As LeDoux says "When one hears the word “fear,” the pull of the vernacular meaning is so strong that the mind is compelled to think of the feeling of being afraid." In fact the amygdala "only contributes to feelings of fear indirectly."

As Barrett puts it, "people rarely work through a logical and empirical proof for a claim, Rather, what I call 'reflective' tools typically do their calculations rapidly." In Barrett's view it is the consistently with a large number of non-reflective beliefs which tip us towards a reflective belief. To the extent that this fits with Damasio's decision making model I think it is accurate. However for Barrett's theory this aspect is important because it underpins his view on what makes for a plausible supernatural belief. This brings us to the subject of minimally counter-intuitive beliefs.

~~oOo~~

Part II follows, 21 Aug.

Bibliography

Ardila, A. (2015) A Proposed Neurological Interpretation of Language Evolution. Behavioural Neurology. doi: 10.1155/2015/872487. Epub 2015 Jun 1.

Barrett, Justin L. (2004) Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Altamira Press.

Bering et al. (2005) The development of ‘afterlife’ beliefs in religiously and secularly schooled children. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 23, 587–607. http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/InstituteofCognitionCulture/FileUploadPage/Filetoupload,90230,en.pdf

Blanco, Fernando; Barberia, Itxaso & Matute, Helena. (2015) Individuals Who Believe in the Paranormal Expose Themselves to Biased Information and Develop More Causal Illusions than Nonbelievers in the Laboratory. PLoS ONE 10(7): e0131378. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0131378

Boden, Matthew Tyler. (2015) Supernatural beliefs: Considered adaptive and associated with psychological benefits. Personality and Individual Differences. 86: 227–231. Via Science Direct.

Cima, Rosie. How Culture Affects Hallucinations. Priceonomics.com. 22 Apr 2015.

Damasio, Antonio. (2006) Descarte's Error. London: Vintage Books.

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

Foucault, Michel. (1988) Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Vintage.

Lakoff, George. (1995) Metaphor, Morality, and Politics, Or, Why Conservatives Have Left Liberals In the Dust. http://www.wwcd.org/issues/Lakoff.html

LeDoux, Joseph. (2015) The Amygdala Is NOT the Brain's Fear Center: Separating findings from conclusions. Psychology Today. 10 Aug. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/i-got-mind-tell-you/201508/the-amygdala-is-not-the-brains-fear-center

Metzinger, Thomas. (2009) The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. Basic Books.

Part II follows, 21 Aug.

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.

Colour words do not correspond to objects or entities. Colours are broadly defined categories of perception. Categories are mental and linguistic structures that help us to organise how we perceive the world. We can use the category name to talk about all the members of a category at once without having to use tedious lists of inclusions and exclusions. This is usually possible because we interact with all members of a category in the same way.

In George Lakoff's powerful model of thinking about categories we define categories towards the middle of a taxonomical hierarchy and by relationship to a prototype. So dog seems like a "natural" category, whereas for every day use: mammal is too broad and includes too many non-dog examples that need to be excluded; while spaniel is too narrow because it leaves out too many dog examples like terrier. Dog as a category works because there are consistent ways that we interact with dogs that are common to all dogs and different from other common pets or wild animals. And also because this interaction is not something personal, but common to other people in our language group. Sometimes pet is a more convenient category: when renting out a house for example. Though we think of categories defined by forms or functions, one of the most important defining properties is how we interact either in fact or potentially with the entities.

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.

It's possible for there to be doubt about membership at the periphery. Is a wolf a member of the dog category? Is a fox? The wild dog is another peripheral case: it looks like a dog, but we interact with it as a wild animal (to which category it belongs with wolf and fox) rather than as pet or worker. There is no upper or lower limit on how many categories we employ or the extent to which they overlap.

navy

royal

cobalt

azure

sapphire

beryl

electric

sky

turquoise

cerulean

teal

cyan

Our terms for colours are categories also. Typically for an English speaker the prototype for blue is the sky. This can get complicated because in England the sky is more often grey than blue, and when it is blue, it's often a very pale and washed out blue compared to where I grew up (about 15 degrees of latitude closer to the equator, about 1000ft above sea level, and with much less pollution). In some cultures lapis lazuli or the throat of a peacock are prototypes (the latter is important in India for example).

Other languages, including many living languages define their categories differently. And research has shown patterns in how languages categorise colours. Many languages for example put blue and green in one category. In ancient Chinese the word 青 qīng meant both blue and green, but also black. In this sense it appears to be similar to the Sanskrit śyāma which can mean black, dark, dark shades of blue or green. Used of people it refers to a dark complexion. So in fact, Śyāma Tārā is not Green Tārā, but Dark or Swarthy Tārā despite the fact that she is routinely depicted in bright hues.

Does this mean that those languages which lump blue in with other colours lack a concept of blue? Not necessarily. Because even blue is a broad category. I can distinguish many shades of blue, from cyan to navy, but I don't have words for all these colours. Similarly I can distinguish many shades of green from the almost yellow green of new spring leaves, to the dark blue-green of New Zealand jade. Think about all the distinctions of colours on a typical paint sampler that we have no words for, but for which arbitrary names have to be invented for marketing purposes. We also have at least one word for a colour that is made up, indigo. When Newton was describing the colours of the rainbows he created with prisms he wanted their to be seven colours to fit in with an alchemical scheme and so invented the colour indigo. What Newton called blue is what today we'd call cyan, and what he called indigo is deep blue like ultramarine or cobalt blue. In fact most English speakers shown swatches of these colours would call them both blue.

As Lakoff explains in his book on categorisation, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, those languages that have four colour terms will have black, white, red and one of either yellow, blue or green (p.25). Now it seems that Ancient Greek was a four colour language.

"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)

This fits the pattern noticed by colour perception research. The Greeks used four colour terms, roughly, white, black, red and yellow. So when Homer uses the phrase "wine dark sea" or describes the sky as "bronze", he is employing categories that are much broader than we currently use in English. In fact modern English has eleven basic colour categories:

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

This does not stop us seeing blueish green, yellowish red, reddish purple and other colours for which we have no name or category. Categories are as broad as are useful to us. And often colours are difficult to categorise. Blue-green colours for example may appear to be in different categories to different people. But there is no evidence to suggest any anatomical differences between speakers of languages with four or less colour terms and those with eleven.

Now colour perception is a feature of our particular sensory apparatus. We've seen recently with the example of "that dress" how the background against which we see something and the colour of the light illuminating it, affect how we perceive it. But vision does have an objective component because the physiology of it is the same for everyone. Light of particular wavelengths hits our retina and activates patterns of the three (sometimes four) kinds of colour sensing cone cells. Each of the cells responds to different frequencies of light.

The peaks of these curves are the same in all humans. This means that where languages have the same colour terms they tend to agree on where in the spectrum the prototype for that category lies. I presume this has applied at least since anatomically modern humans. Now of course turning the signals from our cone cells into the experience of colour is a process that happens in our brains. But it's not arbitrary. For people who are not colour blind the brain is set up for blue cone cells to respond to the same frequency of light. If I shine light with a frequency of 500 nm in your eyes, you'll perceive this in more or less the same way as every other human being regardless of language and culture. Linking the experience to a word is a function of language, but the ability of the language to translate the experience into words is always limited. People with four cones describe a far more vivid palette of colours (What it's like to see 100 times the colors you see). Some animals have cones sensitive to different wavelengths. In particular bees can see much shorter wavelengths - well into what we call the ultraviolet. While snakes can detect much longer wavelengths in the infrared (though not with their eyes)

Now, the story goes that because some languages lack a word that corresponds to the English word blue, and they treat what we call blue as a member of broader colour category, that this means that the speakers of that language could not see blue. This is like saying that because the English lack a word for schadenfreude that they do not enjoy the misfortunes of others, whereas in fact the laughing at the misfortunes of others is very popular here (it is perhaps the most important theme of English humour). So why does this suggestion keep surfacing?

The idea about the Greeks not being able to see blue can be traced to the 19th century British Prime Minister and amateur philologist William Gladstone. He published a long and highly regarded study of Homer's epics and noticed that Homer's colours did not match ours, the "wine-dark sea" being one of the well known examples (wine being reddish-purple in our language, a colour we never associate with the sea). Others joined in. More recently the idea that how we use language reflects how we perceive the world is called Linguistic Relativism. It is also known as the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis because theories about it were postulated (separately) in the early 20th Century by linguistic Benjamin Lee Whorf and his teacher Edward Sapir (amongst others). Whorf in particular was interested in the way that grammar divided the world up into entities and activities. He discovered that some Indigenous American languages seem to not make the same kinds of distinctions. On the basis of this he hypothesised that these differences in grammar might affect how we see the world at a very deep level. How would the world appear to us, for example, if we did not divide it up into nouns and verbs. What if we only had verbs for example, if everything was seen as a process? Whorf asked is the world really is divided up into objects

Linguistic relativism comes and goes in the media. Every few years some journalist comes across Whorf or some other author and writes a piece about it. I should add that Whorf's essays make very good reading (they were collected into a book, Language, Thought and Reality, MIT Press, 1956). The "Greeks couldn't see blue" meme is a popular version of this and one can find many variations on the theme, on the internet, including a few other attempts to debunk it.

However, quite a bit of research has shown that because of the physical apparatus of seeing there is no room for relativistic effects in colour perception. All humans see colour in the same way, even though different languages categorise colours in different ways. Every (normally sighted) human being is capable of seeing millions of colours, most of which we don't have names for (which is where categories come in handy). And all this commonality is true of subsets with variations on the the normal pattern: people with four cones see similarly to each other; people who are red-green colour blind all see the same shades of grey and so on. In other words the research disproves idea that having no word for blue means one cannot see the colour blue. So basically the whole "can't see blue" thing comes down to a failure to read the research on colour vision.

Ironically if you do a simple image search on "Greece" the predominant colours in the results are white and blue, the colours of the modern Greek flag.

~~oOo~~

12 Apr 2015. See also 3-D Map Shows the Colors You See But Can’t Name. Wired.

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.

As described here Yama seems to have been a man (or perhaps an earthly king) who was the first to discover the pitṛloka and be reborn (in heaven) along with his ancestors. Later in the Upaniṣads this is described as 'the world won by the ancestors' (pitṝṇāṃ jitaloka BU 4.3.33). Whether we should take this literally as representing the introduction of the idea of rebirth into Vedic cosmology or as a cosmogonical myth is not clear. Rebirth, though not absent as previously thought, is far from prominent in the Ṛgveda. Since rebirth is not a feature of Indo-European eschatology generally, it may be that as Indic speakers moved into the sub-continent they adopted a rebirth eschatology based on indigenous models. Rebirth does seem to be a regional feature of India thought. So taking this as a myth based on historical events is not entirely far-fetched.

There is a description of Yama's realm in a hymn to Soma (Ṛgveda 9.113.7-11). There an inextinguishable light (jyótir ájasraṃ) shines. It is a realm that is deathless and imperishable (amŕ̥te loké ákṣita). There heaven or the sky is bounded (avaródhanaṃ diváḥ) or perhaps "the inner apartment". It is the place where the dead are satisfied with sacrificial offerings (svadhā́ ca yátra tŕ̥ptiś ca). The refrain prayer of the Kavi in the deathless realm (amŕ̥te loké) is mā́m amŕ̥taṃ kr̥dhi"make me deathless". Which seems to be a prayer to be allowed to stay in Yama's realm instead of being reborn. As we will see in a subsequent essay the Ṛgveda is ambiguous on the question of the afterlife. This description is consistent with Vedic conceptions of heaven more generally. Thus the ancestors (pū́rve pitáraḥ), in this sūkta, seem to live in heaven.

We do find hell in the White or Śukla Yajurveda (30.5).

bráhmaṇe brāhmaṇáṃ kṣatrā́ya rājanyàṃ marúdbhyo váiśyaṃ tápase śūdráṃ támase táskaraṃ nārakā́ya vīraháṇaṃ pāpmáne klībám ākrayā́yā ayogū́ṃ kā́māya pum̐ścalū́m átikruṣṭāya māgadhám ||

For Brahman (Priesthood) he binds a Brahman to the stake; for Kshatra (Royalty) a Râjanya; for the Maruts a Vaisya; for Penance a Sûdra; for Darkness a robber; for Hell a homicide or a man who has lost his consecrated fire; for Misfortune a eunuch; for Venality an Ayogû; for Kâma a harlot; for Excessive Noise a Mâgadha. The Texts of the White Yajurveda, tr. Ralph T.H. Griffith, [1899], at sacred-texts.com

In the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa (8th-6th century BCE?), as in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad (sometimes considered to be an extra chapter of the ŚB), the dead are rewarded or punished according to their performance of the rituals. (Cuevas 271). By the time of the early Upaniṣads however the performance of rituals was seen as inferior to the performance of seeking ātman in one's heart (sometimes referred to as an internalised ritual). Ritual only leads to continued rebirth, whereas realisation of identity with ātman/brahman allowed the practitioner to escape birth and death all together. However there is still no sign of an afterlife destination in which wrong-doers are punished.

Yama in the Garuḍa Purāṇa (4th century CE?) is more like the Buddhist king of Hell as we find him in the Buddhist texts. The dead person is taken by the "High Way" and assumes a body formed from the funeral offerings (piṇḍa) and "feels hungry by day and night". The messengers of Yama are now torturers (Cuevas 271).

Is there Hell in the Ṛgveda Veda?

Accounts of the afterlife in the Ṛgveda are far from unambiguous. Scholars have identified five Ṛgveda passages that might be a reference to hell: 2.29.6, 7.104.3, 9.73.8-9. 10.14.10-11, and 10.152.4 (Stausberg 2000: 219). The most suggestive passage is in sūkta 7.104 which calls on Indra and Soma to destroy an evil sorcerer (yātu) also called demon (rakṣa). In gāthā 3 the poet called on Indra and Soma:

índrāsomā duṣkŕ̥to vavré antár
anārambhaṇé támasi prá vidhyatam |
yáthā nā́taḥ púnar ékaś canódáyat
tád vām astu sáhase manyumác chávaḥ || 7.104.3 ||

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]

Understanding this requires us to look at the context (a series of curses wishing harm and ill on an enemy) and the grammar of the sequence vavré antár anārambhaṇé támasi prá vidhyatam. The various translators produce similar translations:

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,"

It seems Stausberg is struggling with the vocab: 'anchorless' as a reading of anārambhaṇa is peculiar. Ārambhaṇa means 'take hold of, seize; beginning, commencement'. As an adjective anārambhaṇa must mean something like 'beginningless', or as we would say "bottomless". Also vavra is a place of hiding or concealment, a cavern, cave or hole (from √vṛ 'to conceal') so enclosure also seems peculiar. Doniger is trying too hard here, she elects to use both meanings of pra√vyadh, i.e. 'pierce' and 'hurl' (293), where 'hurl' seems sufficient. Griffiths seems to grasp the phrase, but his pseudo-Biblical language is anachronistic. If we step through the structure of padas a & b:

índrāsomā duṣkŕ̥to vavré antár anārambhaṇé támasi prá vidhyatam |

The verbal form, prá vidhyata, is a passive past participle. Note that in Vedic the pre-verb is not always directly connected to the root. In Classical Sanskrit this would be pravidhyata. Indra and Soma are addressed using the vocative case. They are being asked to do the action of hurling (pra√vyadh) [verbal form] the patient, i.e. evil doers (duṣkṛta), into (antar) a hole/pit (vivra) which is darkness (tamas). It is ambiguous on the face of it whether it is a pit which is bottomless or the darkness which is beginningless (and presumably endless). However in RV 1.182.6 (below) we find anārambhaṇé támasi and 'pit' substituted by waters (apsu) suggesting that 'beginningless darkness' was intended.

I don't see why any translators might have chosen to refer to vivra with the definite article. Why "the pit"? It makes this seem like a reference to a known entity. Which pit is the text referring to? In fact no such pit exists in the text. It makes a great deal more sense, given that we have no definite referent, to use the indefinite article 'a pit'.

So the poet is simply asking his gods to bury his enemies in a dark bottomless hole so that they cannot return. This perhaps leaves open the possibility that this poet believed in rebirth and he wanted his gods not only to kill his enemies, but to prevent them from being reborn (a more comprehensive curse! He also requests that the gods burn, crush, shatter, scorch, kill, exile, cut down the same enemies. This does not seem to be a reference to Hell, the poet wishes the gods to punish his enemy in the here and now rather than in the afterlife; if anything he wants to deny them an afterlife. The poet is saying "O Lord, smite my enemies." It's a common theme in these ancient tribal scriptures. We find similar curses in the Old Testament of the Bible and the Avestan Hymn to Mithra.

In his discussion Stausberg highlights RV 1.182.6 which uses some of the same terminology:

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]

However the context is very different. Tugra is rescued after being "cast into the bottomless darkness of the waters" (apsú antár anārambhaṇé támasi práviddham). Our conclusion is the complete opposite of Stausberg's. The two passages are linguistically similar in describing a hole and the deep ocean as bottomless and dark, but there's still no hint of a post-mortem destination.

RV 10.14 is a key sūkta for Yama and also contains some references that have been read as referring to Hell. However they don't mention any of the usual ideas associated with Hell. Indeed the suggested passages end with "grant him good-fortune and health, O King." (rājan svastí cāsmā anamīváṃ ca dhehi) Which doesn't sound much like Hell.

RV 2.29.6 makes a request to several pairs of gods—the twin Ādityas, Varuṇa & Mitra, Indra & Maruts—to be forgiven failings and to be saved the destruction of wolves (nijúro vŕ̥kasya), and from a pit (kartā́d) and from falling (avapada). The later two don't seem to be construed together, the request is phrases as "from a pit" (in the ablative singular). Note that this is a different word for a pit and it has absolutely no context that might relate it to hell.

RV 9.73.8-9 looks more promising. In this sūkta Varuṇa, guardian of the cosmic order, (r̥tásya gopā́) is asked to drive the hated ones, who don't perform the rites, into a pit (ávā́juṣṭān vidhyati karté avratā́n 8d) and those who are incompetent with fall into a pit (átrā kartám áva padāti áprabhuḥ 9d), unlike the wise (dhī́rāś). The word for pit is karta as in RV 2.29. However is the pit anything supernatural here, or is it a pit?

Finally 10.152.4 In pada b Griffiths reads ádharaṃ gamayā támaḥ as "Send [him] down to nether darkness" but adharaṃ and tamaḥ are not in the same case. If tamaḥ here is a noun, and the verb is √gam 'to go' then (as in the Life of Brian) the verbs of motion take the accusative: tamam. Here tamaḥ is a nominative singular. "Nether Darkness would translate"adharam tamam, but not adharam tamaḥ. If we take the pada as a whole:

yó asmā́m̐ abhidā́sati ádharaṃ gamayā támaḥ

He who is dark (yo tamaḥ), treating us as inferior (asmā́m̐ abhidā́sati ádharaṃ) should be made to go (gamayā).

Thus again the relationship to Hell is less than tenuous. And this sums up all of the evidence for Hell in the Ṛgveda. We can be fairly certain that the Ṛgveda has no conception of a afterlife realm of punishment that corresponds to Hell. We need to look more closely at what kind of afterlife the Ṛgveda does know: i.e. the pitṛloka, discovered by Yama, and the devaloka.

Pitṛloka & Devaloka.

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

For a culture which sees the performance of ritual as determining one's afterlife destination there appears to be little or no need for a concept of Hell. The Vedas hint at a bad destination for enemies of the Brahmins, but it's not until the world is ethicised that an afterlife which punishes wrong doing is needed. And by punishment I mean something beyond the withholding of paradise from the inept ritualist. How and when Hell becomes part of Vedic cosmology and eschatology is not entirely clear and I have only a few scattered references to work from. There's not much to indicate that one could return to the human realm having been in Hell.

If we do not see hell as an afterlife destination in the Ṛgveda, then the obvious question is when do we see it in Indian literature? This is not a question I can answer yet.

We can now come back to the question of the meaning of niraya/naraka. In seeking to understand the word, such etymology as there is has sought a connection to Hell. However as we see originally Yama's loka was original not an underworld place of suffering at all. Indeed it was a place in the sky where one experienced (presumably joyful) reuniting with one's ancestors. It became the destination for men (nṛ) who performed the correct rituals. As such a name which was a collective adjective based on nṛ i.e. naraka or nāraka would make sense. We could then explain niraya as a dialectical variation. Against this explanation is the lack of any parallels. All the words starting with nir- in PED are derived from the suffix nis-. This fact suggests that niraya and naraka are two unrelated words. My hunch, however, is that they are related.

Hell in Zoroastrianism

Based on ideas first put forward by Michael Witzel I've speculated that the impetus to escape from a once happy rebirth eschatology was also influenced by Iranian (i.e. Zoroastrian) ideas. The vector for these ideas being an influx of Iranian tribes, including the Śākyas, whose culture gave rise to śrāmaṇa religions. Since we do not see Hell in Vedic, it's possible that the idea of Hell came from this same source. In order for this to be true the Vedic speaking people's had to leave Iran before the advent of Zoroastrianism which is difficult to date, but generally placed at about 1000 BCE.

However Hell is barely mentioned in the oldest Zoroastrian scriptures. As the Encyclopedia Iranica (EI) says:

Hell is not explicitly mentioned in the Gathas. There are only allusions made to it, if not in Yasna 31.20, at least in Yasna 46.11, where it is said that the soul and the daēnā of the wicked arriving at the Činwad Bridge (Av. činuuatō pərətu) will be guests in the “house of falsehood” (Av. drūjō dəmānā-), and in Yasna 51.13.The word hell, literally bad existence (Av. daožaŋᵛha-, Pahl. dušox, Pers. duzaḵ) only occurs in the later Avesta.

When Hell is mentioned it is a place of torture in recompense for bad thoughts, words and deeds. Unfortunately for my conjecture the time-line is not yet clear, but the indications are that Hell developed at around the same time in Iran as it did in India.

The Iranian twin of Yama is a mythic King called Jamšid aka Yima. He is a culture hero, a king who ruled the world in a Golden Age. "Yima is said to be like the sun to look at among men (huuarə.darəsō maṧiiānąm; Yasna 9.4) and his life is immortal and “sun-filled” (xᵛanuuaṇt, Yasna 9.1)," (EI). As with Yama, the Iranian Yima is the son of a solar figure (Skt. Vivasvant, Av. Vīuuaŋᵛhant, “the one who shines far and wide”, and in this aspect he "made the world immortal",. How Yima bequeathed immortality and why humans are no longer immortal are not told in older texts and several versions of the story exist in later texts. Stories which connect Yima to Hell come rather late in the piece.

There are three references in the narratives above to Yima going to Hell: for his sins, in order to close the door to Hell so that death would be kept out, and in order to bring the paymān(ag) [right measure] out of Hell. (EI)

Paymān "is characteristic of Zoroastrian ethics and is discussed at length in the Middle Persian texts" (EI). So while the connection to Hell is not entirely clear, Yama is a figure common to both Indian and Iranian myth, giving him considerable antiquity. And in both mythic systems he is associated with extending the lives of humans: Yama through rebirth, and Yima through immortality. However both meet with a downfall: Yama becomes the ruler of Hell, and Yima sins and is sent to Hell as punishment. That there should be commonality in the earlier versions of the myth is not unexpected since we already know of parallels between the Ṛgveda and the Avesta, but that that developments of the myth should continue to follow parallel paths is intriguing.

Yama in Buddhist Texts

Yama is mentioned in only a few texts. In an earlier essay on the history of Kamma I wrote:

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).

This is one of the most important occurrences. Another slightly different version of the story is found at AN 3.36, showing once again that the Pāḷi Canon is an incompletely merged anthology drawing on multiple retellings of the source material.

At SN 1.49 those who are stingy or hinder alms gathering are said to be reborn in Hell, as an animal or in Yama's realm (Nirayaṃ tiracchānayoniṃ, yamalokaṃ upapajjare), which is interesting. Recall that the departed (preta) where originally on their way to Yama's realm (yamaloka) to live with their ancestors (pitṛ), but the pretas became a kind of being in purgatory. Thus yamaloka here, as distinguished from niraya, might refer to the pretas. Bodhi also concludes this, but we don't know. Buddhaghosa's commentary is silent at this point.

At SN 1.33 we find Yama mentioned in an udāna uttered by a devatā:

Yo dhammaladdhassa dadāti dānaṃ,
Uṭṭhānavīriyādhigatassa jantu;
Atikkamma so vetaraṇiṃ yamassa,
Dibbāni ṭhānāni upeti macco ti.

The one who gives the gift of the received Dharma
Obtained though exertion and devotion
He crosses over Yama's river Vetaraṇī
That mortal one approaches the heavenly regions.

The river Vetaraṇī is mentioned only one other time in the Suttanipata, Sn 674. It appears to be a river in Hell itself that the evil-doers fall into, and thus not much like the Styx, contra Bodhi in his translations notes on SN (2000: 364-5 n.67).

Finally Yama receives a passing mention: DN 13 (i.246) in a list of Vedic devas. This is not much to go on. Yama is a rāja, who rules over Hell, questions the souls of the dead, and has some messengers. This is broadly speaking the Vedic Yama.

Thus despite his later prominence in Buddhist myth, Yama is actually quite a marginal figure in the Nikāyas. Anālayo notes in his study of the Majjhimanikāya that Yama's role in the Buddhist texts has been reduced from active to passive so as to avoid a conflict with the doctrine of karma (2011: 748 n.303). Most of the later stories and images seem to depend on the Devadūta Sutta. This text was translated into Chinese five separate times (EA 32.4, T 86, T 42, T 43, MA 64) and there are a number of partial parallels ( T 24*, T 25*, T 212.9*, T 741*, DA 30*). The variations are discussed by Anālayo (2011: 747-53). A translation of MĀ 64 can be found in Bingenheimer, Anālayo and Bucknell (2013: 407).

Māra

It's worth saying a few words about Māra here, though he deserves his own essay. In contrast to Yama who presides over Naraka, Māra is an unrelated figure apparently emerging from non-Vedic tradition, along with Yakṣas and a goddess of good fortune known as Sirī (Skt. Śrī). The name derives from the causative form of the verb √mṛ 'die'; present verb mṛyate, causative mārayati. Thus māra is literally 'causing to die', or 'killing'. He's also known by the epithet pāpima'evil one'. Māra is sometimes said to preside or rule over saṃsāra, and one of his biggest concerns is that people will escape saṃsāra. In this sense he stands for the repeated deaths that one must undergo in saṃsāra and all the associated grief. Māra uses the weapons of saṃsāra (desire, aversion, confusion), often in personified forms (his daughters represent desire and his army aversion). However though it might seem obvious to link Māra with Yama, there seems to be no connection between the two in practice. Yama is not evil in the way that Māra is. However Yama is sometimes written of as a personification of death, where he is called Mṛtyu 'Death'.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

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).

My decad of Buddhist converts, from the 1990s, tend to take the idea that Buddhism was primarily about meditation producing a revolution in consciousness at face value. Sure, we acknowledge the role of other practices and facets of Buddhism, but we see meditation as the most important and most significant Buddhist practice. I've certainly heard colleagues of mine disparage those who do not meditate in terms that suggest they believe that one can scarcely even be a Buddhist if one does not meditate. Clearly this was an idea that appealed to earlier decads as well, particularly those who converted to Buddhist in the 1960s and 1970s. The baby-boomer generation were particularly interested in revolutions of consciousness, at least partly because they were under the influence of psychedelic drugs. Especially in the UK, where most of my teachers come from, they had grown up and come of age in drab, post-war, austerity Britain. They can often remember rationing and bomb craters. American hippies rebelled against a different kind culture. So, with the end of the war the questioning of authority and society that had begun to flower after WWI could get into full swing, though sadly it ended with the capitulation to Neoliberalism and a virtual abdication of power to large, conservative business interests. As Frank Zappa insightfully quipped: "Government is the entertainment wing of the military-industrial complex." It also reminds us that counterculture was always a minority sport.

The Romanticism of Suzuki and his presentation of Buddhism as about seeking radical transformation of consciousness fitted precisely what many of my older colleagues were searching for. Even now they can easily be induced to reminisce about the old days of free love and cheap, but potent, LSD. And Suzuki's writing was at the forefront of popularising Buddhism in the 20th century, especially in the USA where Zen had a much greater presence.

Those of us who were teens in the 1980s had a different experience from the baby-boomers. I grew up in New Zealand. From the year of my birth (1966), France conducted a total of 193 atmospheric and underground nuclear weapon tests (CTBTO) in the Pacific. There were very real concerns about nuclear fallout and there is still the possibility of massive nuclear-radiotide leaks into the ocean from Mururoa Atoll. The Cold War and its arms race were in full swing. We knew that the life on earth could be destroyed 1000s of times over by the stockpiles of nuclear weapons that world powers constructed and aimed at each other, and that Northern Hemisphere leaders seemed to be in love with brinkmanship. Would New Zealand be spared? Or would the fall out mean slow death rather than fast? In my view, the X in Generation X stands for "Cold War" or "annihilation by nuclear weapons". In the same period the UK joined the European Community and began to dismantle remaining ties with former colonies, such as New Zealand.

I suspect my generation took the same recreational drugs as our parents generation, but for different reasons, primarily as an escapist response to the anxiety of a world full of threat. Our counter-culture was not hippies and "free love", but punk and "anger is an energy". We also saw the abandoning of content for style (the triumph of Andy Warhol's fascination with the superficial and banal), the rise of the yuppy, and the collapse of Western Socialism (along with powerful labour unions and generous welfare). I watched my conditions of employment be radically undermined by Neoliberalism. Rewards for being a loyal employee for example were eradicated during my professional life as a librarian. Old values were replaced by a relentless drive for productivity and target culture. As a result we now work more hours for less pay. It's hard not to view this with an element of cynicism for the world of politics and business. Unfortunately the propaganda of Neoliberalism is powerful, and many of my cohort simply fatalistically embrace this 'every man for himself' culture.

The attraction of Buddhism to my generation, then, is far less idealistic on the whole. We don't seek Romantic transcendence so much as nihilistic escape from a hostile world that does not value life or the environment except in Utilitarian terms. Romanticism in this view is a failure, comprehensively triumphed over by Utilitarianism and profit seeking. Romanticism was a decadent, aristocratic movement with no relevance to our lives. It was blind to the realpolitik and, in our time, crushed by businessmen bent on accumulating obscene amounts of wealth at any cost. Far fewer of us were interested in pursuing religion and numbers of Buddhist converts began to drop off.

However our ancient Buddhist predecessors were after something different again. Drewes concludes:

"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]

This captures in a nutshell some of the misgivings that I have developed in my years of studying Buddhist texts. The stated or implied goals of the texts are often very different from what we say we are pursuing, and radically at odds with how we pursue them. The more secular the orientation, the less in common with Buddhism that Buddhists seem to have. On the other hand I was a participant recently in a discussion about "merit". It was very difficult to get my colleagues to acknowledge the ancient pattern of the puṇya economy, and the discussion was resolutely steered towards redefining merit in secular terms without the willingness to acknowledge that this redefinition had little to do with the traditional understanding. Merit is one of many inconvenient truths about traditional Buddhism.

One of the big complaints about the popularity of Mindfulness Therapies is that they commercialise the Dharma. The complaint appears valid on face value because part of the narrative of Western Buddhism is of "spiritual" monks unconcerned with temporal matters (temporal contrasts with eternal here). But this complaint simply does not stand against the history of monks and monasteries. For as long as we have history of Buddhist institutions we see them involved in commerce. Not just using money, but at times coining it. Not just trading in products, but in usury. Buddhists have often enjoyed and ruthlessly exploited tax exemptions. Buddhists, or the demands of the Buddhist religion, have bankrupted more than one state. Notably the Tang Dynasty in China which ended up sacking the monasteries in 845 CE to recover solvency (rather like Henry VIII had to do in the 16th century). At other times Buddhists have virtually or actually taken over the executive arm of government, with Tibet being the most egregious example of this. Most of the wealth of Tibet, up to 1959, was tied up in and controlled by monks living in monasteries. The clergy doubled as a civil service. And senior positions in government were occupied by "reincarnated" men. The Chinese were not wrong about how oppressive this form of government was. Had there been a drop of oil in Tibet there is no doubt in my mind that the West would also have been keen to introduce democracy to the backward and oppressive Tibetan state. The pattern is repeated across Asia. Where we perceive Buddhism as a bulwark against Merchantilism, in fact historically the Buddhist establishment has typically exemplified what we seek to escape from. In countries with a large established Buddhist clergy it still does. Buddhist organisations tend to be rigidly hierarchical, patriarchal, authoritarian and acquisitive.

We idealise Buddhism in terms of legendary times and places where motivations were clear and monks were "pure". Amongst my Buddhist colleagues and contemporaries I constantly scent the matter/spirit duality that seems to define Western notions of spirituality, even, or perhaps especially amongst Buddhists. It's not that they proclaim this dualism, but that the beliefs they do proclaim seem inextricably bound up in rejection of matter and attempts to embrace "spirit". We see it negatively in the anti-science and anti-intellectual stances that are common amongst Buddhists, which confusingly lives alongside claims that Buddhism is compatible with a rationalist worldview. We see it positively in the yearning for transcendence (of the material) and the search for the "true nature of reality".

Meanwhile the vast majority of Buddhists are really only dabbling in techniques that do not lead to any great revolution in consciousness. For most Buddhists these days the demands of work and family leave very little time for concerted practice. The business culture means that more is demanded from workers, while as consumers the war for our attention means we are constantly bombarded with intense sensory stimulation. Precious few attain anything like nirvāṇa, and those who do generally make the point that it's nothing like the idealised narratives in the texts. Most Buddhists are simply aiming to pad out saṃsāra and make life in the kāmadhatu more bearable. There's really no problem with this lifestyle. Historically this is how the vast majority of Buddhists have lived. But we presently lie to ourselves about how effective our practice is and what we might achieve. We may as well fess up about this. We may as well tailor our offering to the reality of the situation.

For example very little of what the Triratna Buddhist Order offers is aimed at families. We talk mainly to individuals and still treat people as separate from their familial context. We no longer, I think, actively encourage people to abandon their present context and dive into a religious life. We no longer encourage (particularly men) to leave partners and families and become fulltime practitioners. In any case the full-immersion experience is more difficult to find and sustain in these days of aging Buddhists. Changes to the welfare system in the UK since the 1980s have been devastating to our ability to live without doing productive work for example. The collapse of profits from our premier right-livelihood business some 10 years ago, and the demise of that business as I write, has reduced the amount of money we have available for supporting experimentation. That said, more and more of us are married, with kids, working, and concerned about surviving retirement, but we still aim our programs at single adults and design our centres for them.

Certainly anyone interested in the history of Buddhism and in the study of that history, especially in what is these days called the Early Mahāyāna, should read Drewes article. It is a very concise smackdown of a number of preconceptions about history that have been prominent. But that aside the implications are huge for how we understand the present, how we come to terms with our modern Buddhism, with the secularist trends and the reasonable doubts that arise from the clash with a modern worldview. The whole presentation of modern Buddhism is an apologetic, by which we mean an attempt at justification. We don't see it because most of us don't have the time and skills to delve deeper. One of the nice things about the move towards open access publishing and a website like academia.edu is that it gives the general reader access to literature that 10 years ago would have remained out of reach.

I've said before that in the battle between traditional religion and modernity, and it really is a battle, it's not science that is really devastating, but history. When we understand quite how much history has been distorted in order to make Buddhism attractive to modern Westerners it is salutary. It's not really a lie as such. The intention was, I'm sure, to make Buddhism accessible. But we too often lose sight of what is done to achieve this goal. We don't get to see the translators at work. They don't footnote their changes. This may be because they are largely working unconsciously. But we then base our apologetics on a form of Buddhism that only ever existed in myth and argue that we are blessed with authenticity because we conform to a distorted history. The irony is that we follow a religion which is vehemently critical of views, when we cannot help but relate to our views rather than the Dharma because we don't even see that we have views. All too many of us are convinced that our view is the Dharma.

~~oOo~~

Yāmagaṇḍika: Telling the Time in Ancient India

What can the Turing Test Tell Us?

The Heart Sutra in Middle Chinese

Critiquing Buddhist Karma

A Sutta on Freewill

Individuals, Philosophy, and Interconnectedness

Nirvāṇa Sūtra, Madhyāgama 55.

Nirvāṇa Sūtra.

English Translation

Alternate Karma Theory?

Buddhist Shibboleths

Kātyāyana in the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra

Early Mahāyāna: Everything You Know is Wrong

Who Were the Artharvans?

Form is Emptiness. Part I: Establishing the Text

Form is Emptiness. Part II: Commentary

Form is Emptiness. Part III: Commentary continued.

Sanskrit, Dravidian, and Munda

Why Are Karma and Rebirth (Still) Plausible (for Many People)? Part I

Seeing Blue.

Yama and Hell

Convert Buddhism