Abhisaṅkhataṁ abhisañcetayitaṁ: prepared & intended

Discussion
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I wanted to share my recent thoughts regarding the term sankhāra. It’s clear to me that this term alludes to some putting-together of things, and that contemporary translations overemphasize its aspect of intentionality (‘choice’ or ‘will’ for example).

I wanted to point to a few discourses to support my interpretation. First, majjhima nikaya 52, to the citizen of atthakanāgara:
In this discourse the Buddha says that someone makes a breakthrough to arahantship or non-return by seeing through the jhānas, the brahmāvihāras, or the formless liberations as abhisaṅkhataṁ abhisañcetayitaṁ.

The pairing of these terms could suggest that they have distinct meanings. All translators agree on the second word as referring to intention. The Buddha could have left it as such, but he also said these states are abhisaṅkhataṁ. Was he being redundant?

I want to point next to the culavedalla sutta MN 44. In it there is an exposition of three types of sankhara: bodily, verbal and mental. This discourse makes quite clear that these three types of sankhara condition, form, make up, prepare or even put together other phenomena. ‘Vitakka & vicāra are a speech preparation: because of thinking & pondering, one breaks out into speech’ (to paraphrase).
One contemporary translator neutralizes the conditional aspect of the term by rendering it ‘activities’ which clearly misses the point in context.

Let’s look at another sutta, the nandakovāda sutta, MN 146. There are two similes, one of a candle light and the other the shade of a tree. These phenomena are stated as being dependent on other phenomena, however taken to be self. Although the discourse doesn’t wield the term sankhāra, it’s this relationship I believe is inherent to the word. Candle light is formed, prepared, put-together or conditioned by candle wax, wick and flame. Shade is formed, prepared, put-together or conditioned by trunk, branches and foliage. Thus, the conditioners condition the conditioned.

See SN 22.79 khajjanīya sutta which says the very same thing: Saṅkhatamabhisaṅkharontīti kho, bhikkhave, tasmā ‘saṅkhārā’ti vuccati.

Provided this context, any word one choose should be consistent across the board.

Conditioners condition the conditioned
Constructors construct the constructed
Formations form the formed
Preparations prepare the prepared

It’s quite clear from the above context that the term sankhara is an allusion to forming, putting together or causality. Myself, I would say the term is obfuscated by some contemporary translations and, as a result, discourses dealing in dependent origination will be lost. I could point to inspiration from other authors or content creators regarding the term, but I thought to produce this post according to how I’ve interpreted the term rather than citing from those who’ve inspired me.

If you have feedback good, bad or neutral, feel free to share it

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Makeup makes up the made-up, that’s why it’s called makeup

:eye: :mouth: :eye:

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More than intention is required to develop jhana. There are other sankhara processes such as mindfulness, right view, letting go & others. This might be why the two words are used. I remember reading in that mn 44 sutta how the Noble Eightfold Path is also sankhata. :watermelon:

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Generally speaking, sankhara is a gloss of karmic action of any kind in my opinion, which I’ve formed by looking at texts of various traditions. Some traditions considered intention to also serve as a gloss of karmic action, too.

And so the two words came to refer to the same thing (i.e., if a = c and b = c, then a = b). Because some traditions put a lot of intellectual stock in equating karma with intention, sankhara lost its original meaning and became another word for cetana, essentially.

This is the case for whatever tradition the Theravada suttas descend from. It wasn’t the case in all traditions, however. So, it’s one of the many problems of later sectarian Buddhism literature. Understandings of words diverged in some cases.

I don’t myself think this confusion goes back to the Buddha. It happened afterward.

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How about habits for sankhara, there are bodily, verbal and mental habits.
Or does Pali already have a word for habit?

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Habitualized behavior is certainly the result of prior decisions/ choices/ conditioning.

So, present moment choices are fueled by prior decisions and also fuel future conditions.

Of course, not all present moment conditions one encounters is the result of conditioning. But the way one navigates the moment is based on prior conditioning, combined with free will (a choice).
It’s a very complicated interplay.

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Hi!,

It suggests they have the same meaning, because such redundancy is a standard tool in Pali to make sure the meaning got better preserved when the discourse was transmitted orally. It’d be easy to mistake one isolated word in chanting but harder to mistake two synonyms in succession.

This synonymity between sankhara and cetana is also confirmed by SN22.57:

Katame ca, bhikkhave, saṅkhārā? Chayime, bhikkhave, cetanākāyā—rūpasañcetanā …pe… dhammasañcetanā. Ime vuccanti, bhikkhave, saṅkhārā.

But it is true that the word sankhara has a wide range of meanings, which to some extend overlap. It is the will/intention (i.e. karma) that does the “conditioning” or “putting together” of the next life, I think is the idea in Dependent Arising. We see this also in suttas like SN12.39:

Mendicants, what you intend, what you plan, and what you have a tendency towards, that is a foundation for the continuation of consciousness [in a next life].

Here we have the standard link sankhara > consciousness of Dependent Arising put in different words. This is more clear if considering the sutta as a whole because the continuation of consciousness is followed by the conception [i.e birth] of namarupa, followed by the six senses, contact, etc.

There is also a repeated sentence that makes it quite clear that sankhara and karma are effectively synonyms in this context. For example, in AN4.233:

And what are dark deeds (kamma) with dark results? It’s when someone makes hurtful choices (sankhara) by way of body, speech, and mind.

Having made these choices, they’re reborn in a hurtful world, where hurtful contacts strike them. Touched by hurtful contacts, they experience hurtful feelings that are exclusively painful—like the beings in hell. These are called dark deeds with dark results.

This is outside the direct context of Dependent Arising, so the word can have a slightly different meaning here. I think Ven Sujato’s footnote to the MN44 passage is helpful:

These “processes” (saṅkhārā) apply, as we shall see, in the development of meditation (SN 41.6:1.5, DN 18:24.1). They must be distinguished from the similarly named three kinds of “choices” (saṅkhārā) that define volitional activity determining rebirth (i.e. karma, MN 57:8.2) [in context of Dependent Origination].

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Herein… the (noble) disciple, making self-surrender the object of (their) thought, lays hold of concentration, lays hold of one-pointedness. (The disciple), aloof from sensuality, aloof from evil conditions, enters on the first trance, which is accompanied by thought directed and sustained, which is born of solitude, easeful and zestful, and abides therein.

(SN 48.10, tr. Pali Text Society vol V p 174; “noble” substituted for Ariyan.)

What is “self-surrender”, if not the abandonment of agency in action?

…I have seen that the ceasing of the activities is gradual. When one has attained the first trance, speech has ceased. When one has attained the second trance, thought initial and sustained has ceased. When one has attained the third trance, zest has ceased. When one has attained the fourth trance, inbreathing and outbreathing have ceased… Both perception and feeling have ceased when one has attained the cessation of perception and feeling.

(SN 36.11, tr. Pali Text Society vol IV p 146.)

The abandonment of agency in inhalation and exhalation, the “cessation of inhalation and exhalation”, is a tricky one. I would submit the following, from a piece I’m composing now for my own website:

Like our posture, most of us are unaware of our breathing most of the time. We can even be unaware of moments when we hold our breath. Moshe Feldenkrais wrote of how people often hold their breath in standing up from a seated position, and he explained why that is so:

The tendency to hold one’s breath is instinctive, part of an attempt to prevent the establishment of shearing stresses or forces likely to shift the vertebrae horizontally, out of the vertical alignment of the spinal column that they constitute.

(“Awareness Through Movement”, Moshe Feldenkrais, p 83)

He also explained how the tendency to hold one’s breath in standing can be overcome:

…When the center of gravity has really moved forward over the feet a reflex movement will originate in the old nervous system and straighten the legs; this automatic movement will not be felt as an effort at all.

(ibid, p 78)

Feldenkrais stipulated, there must be “no muscular effort deriving from voluntary control”:

… there must be no muscular effort deriving from voluntary control, regardless of whether this effort is known and deliberate or concealed from the consciousness by habit.

(ibid, p 76)

I would suggest that the cessation of agency in inhalation and exhalation takes place by a similar mechanism, initially by engaging gravity with the feelings of zest and ease wherever “one-pointedness of mind” takes place:

… (a person) steeps, drenches, fills, and suffuses this body with zest and ease, born of solitude, so that there is not one particle of the body that is not pervaded by this lone-born zest and ease.

(AN 5.28, tr. Pali Text Society vol. III pp 18-19)

Words like “steeps” and “drenches” imply that a fluid sense of weight accompanies the feelings of zest and ease.

There’s a transition to “reflex movement” as the activity of the body in inhalation and exhalation in the fourth concentration, “reflex movement” brought about purely by the location of “one-pointedness”:

… (one suffuses one’s) body with purity by the pureness of (one’s) mind so that there is not one particle of the body that is not pervaded with purity by the pureness of (one’s) mind.

(AN 5.28, Pali Text Society Vol. III p 19)

The meaning of “sankara” I think is clear in the context of the cessation of agency in action–it has to do with “voluntary control, regardless of whether this effort is known and deliberate or concealed from the consciousness by habit”.

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I believe it was nāgārjuna who said all sankhāras are sankhata, and all sankhata are sankhāras

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It seems there are a lot of words that can refer to habits in some way. Habits condition phenomena and are themselves conditioned, so the words sankhāra and sankhata can certainly apply

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In those cases where multiple words are used to mean the same thing for clarity and emphasis, I recall there being more than two words together

I would agree there is some overlap between the terms, and the suttas you brought in expanded my understanding

I don’t see good reason for the same word to mean something different in the context of MN 44 — I think a word like preparations works in every context while other word choices are narrower and more limited

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It took me a minute to understand what you were saying here, but I think it makes sense.

There’s definitely a volitional component to sankhāra, but I maintain there it always has the meaning of putting together.

The term asankhata meaning unconditioned shows this very well.

“There is, bhikkhus, a not-born, a not-brought-to-being, a not-made, a not-conditioned. If, bhikkhus, there were no not-born, not-brought-to-being, not-made, not-conditioned, no escape would be discerned from what is born, brought-to-being, made, conditioned. But since there is a not-born, a not-brought-to-being, a not-made, a not-conditioned, therefore an escape is discerned from what is born, brought-to-being, made, conditioned.”

  • Itivuttaka 43
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According to the consensus of the schools, the Sutta Pitaka was arranged in five agamas, ‘traditions’ (the usual term, but the Sthaviravadins more often call them nikayas, ‘collections’).

… Ksudraka Agama (outside of the first four agamas there remained a number of texts regarded by all the schools as of inferior importance, either because they were compositions of followers of the Buddha and not the words of the Master himself, or because they were of doubtful authenticity… these were collected in this ‘Minor Tradition’).

(“Indian Buddhism”, A. K. Warder, 2nd ed. p 202)

On Warder:

For a number of years, he was an active member of the Pali Text Society, which published his first book, Introduction to Pali, in 1963. He based this popular primer on extracts from the Dīgha Nikāya, and took the then revolutionary step of treating Pali as an independent language, not just a derivative of Sanskrit.

His began his academic career at the University of Edinburgh in 1955, but in 1963 moved to the University of Toronto. There, as Chairman of the Department of East Asian Studies, he built up a strong programme in Sanskrit and South Asian studies. He retired in 1990.

(WIkipedia)

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If this were the only sutta this occurred in and it contradicted earlier suttas, this would be valid — actually, to my knowledge the Itivuttaka isn’t considered a late addition, but anyway, there are many other uses in ‘non-fake’ areas of the canon, both sankhata and asankhata. It always refers to conditionality, and I don’t know of anyone who disputes this.

My point is that conditionality is built into the meaning of sankhāra.

If Buddha meant merely intentionality, then I posit he would’ve used intentionality in order to avoid any confusion.

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I apologize, I meant to point that out and open it to discussion, but I ran out of time.

Here’s a sermon that references the “unborn” from MN 26:

So I, … being liable to birth because of self, having known the peril in what is liable to birth, seeking the unborn, the uttermost security from the bonds–nibbana–won the unborn, the uttermost security from the bonds–nibbana; being liable to ageing because of self, having known the peril in what is liable to ageing, seeking the unageing, the uttermost security from the bonds–nibbana–won the unageing, the uttermost security from the bonds; being liable to decay… won the undecaying; …liable to dying… won the undying; … liable to sorrow… won the unsorrowing… ; liable to stain because of self, having known the peril in what is liable to stain, seeking the stainless, the uttermost security from the bonds–nibbana–won the stainless, the uttermost security from the bonds–nibbana. Knowledge and Vision arose in me: unshakable is freedom for me, this is the last birth, there is not now again-becoming.

(MN 26, Pali Text Society translation vol I p 211)

In Itivuttaka 43, I’m left with the impression that the “unborn” is a thing–“If, bhikkhus, there were no not-born“. In MN 26, I’m left with the impression that the “unborn” is a state: “seeking the unborn, the uttermost security from the bonds–nibbana“. I think the notion that the “unborn” is a thing, or that it exists as a thing in itself, is misleading, but I don’t read Pali.

When you say, “there’s definitely a volitional component to sankhāra, but I maintain there it always has the meaning of putting together“, I’m thinking about:

…I say that determinate thought is action. When one determines, one acts by deed, word, or thought.

(AN 6.63, translation Pali Text Society vol III p 294)

The topic is action, but a particular kind of action, a putting-together of “determinate thought” (volition, to most of us) and action. Not what you meant, by “the meaning of putting together”?

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The unconditioned/unborn/unprepared, etc has to be a ‘thing’ by the fact that linguistic convention requires it to speak. Nibbāna, not being subject to the world’s conventions of logic, can only be pointed to in speech so yes, it’s a thing but at the same time it’s not.

All ‘things’ are created by the mind as per Dhammapada 1. The mind itself is a construction, so it follows that what it constructs are mere constructs.

Dhammapada 277-279 show that every ‘thing’ apart from nibbāna is referred to as a construction. The distinction has to be made because even tho all things are not self, only the constructed things are impermanent and suffering

These things are never actually what they purport to be, but rather some thing, which depends on some thing, which we mistake to be something else

The world’s tendency is to see the thing as a standalone reality when in fact it’s just a collection of parts — this reality is fully broken thru to by arahants, as I understand it @Mark_Foote I made an additional comment to clarify this point below

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Really, I should say a noble disciple rather than an arahant. The stream enterer is incapable of seeing sankhārā as permanent, pleasant or self — I recall reading that in AN but can’t immediately find the reference @Mark_Foote

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In MN 26, Gautama appears to equate “the unborn” with nibbana, which in your analysis would make it not a construction. Whereas, in Itivuttaka 43, “there is, bhikkyus, a not born”. Granted, he equates it with a “not conditioned”, yet it still rings like a “thing” to me.

I think of MN 109:

Then a reasoning arose in the mind of a certain monk thus: ‘It is said, sir, that material shape is not self, feeling is not self, perception is not self, the habitual tendencies are not self, consciousness is not self. Then what self do deeds affect that are done by not-self?’

Then [Gautama], knowing by mind the reasoning in the mind of this monk, addressed the monks, saying: This situation exists, monks, when some foolish man here, not knowing, ignorant, with his mind in the grip of craving, may deem to go beyond the Teacher’s instruction thus: ‘It is said, sir, that material shape is not self… consciousness is not self. Then what self do deeds affect that are done by not-self?’ You, monks, have been trained by me (to look for) conditions now here, now there, in these things and in those.

(MN 109, translation Pali Text Society vol III pp 68-69)

There was a situation in mathematics in the early twentieth century, where Hilbert and his cohort attempted to put all of mathematics on an axiomatic basis. The idea was to be able to build all that was known to be true in mathematics out of a few axioms, as with Euclid’s geometry.

With the publication of Godel’s theorems in the 1930’s, Hilbert’s attempt was abandoned. Godel proved that if all of mathematics could be generated from a set of axioms, then those axioms would also generate contradictions, whereas if the axioms did not generate contradictions, then not all of mathematics could be proven from them. An astounding piece of mathematics, and the first to be verified with a computer program that could run the complete logic.

I believe Gautama avoided possible contradictions by not asserting some things, and the passage in MN 109 demonstrates that he was aware that there were limits to what he could teach.

That is my beef with the fifth Nikaya (which I believe includes Dhammapada)–I feel that the limits that Gautama observed are often no longer observed, in that Nikaya. I have the same beef with the sermons attributed to Gautama’s disciples, including Sariputta.

I know–picky, picky!

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This is truly something refined

In the first sermon, it is said that nibbāna is to be realized

Atakkāvacara, atakkāgocara, abyākata, these are qualities of nibbāna, thing or not. I think this is an example of this:

These are the world’s usages, terms, expressions, and descriptions, which the Realized One uses without misapprehending them.
Imā kho, citta, lokasamaññā lokaniruttiyo lokavohārā lokapaññattiyo, yāhi tathāgato voharati aparāmasan”ti.
DN 9

The bhikkhuni sutta talks about relying on conceit to uproot conceit. I would only adhere to the texts to the extent necessary to see what experiential truths they’re pointing to

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“three types of sankhara: bodily, verbal and mental”–From one of the posts on my own website:

Many people in the Buddhist community take enlightenment to be the goal of Buddhist practice. I would say that when a person consciously experiences automatic movement in the activity of the body in inhalation and exhalation, finding a way of life that allows for such experience in the natural course of things becomes the more pressing concern. Gautama taught such a way of living, although I don’t believe that such a way of living is unique to Buddhism.

(A Way of Living)

There, I’m only talking about “the cessation of inhalation and exhalation”, the cessation of volitive activity in the body in inhaling and exhaling. The contact of freedom through the cessation of volitive activity in the body in inhaling and exhaling:

…I say that determinate thought is action. When one determines, one acts by deed, word, or thought.

(AN 6.63, tr. Pali Text Society vol III p 294)

And what… is the ceasing of action? That ceasing of action by body, speech, and mind, by which one contacts freedom,–that is called ‘the ceasing of action’.

(SN 35.146, tr. Pali Text Society vol IV p 85)

…I have seen that the ceasing of the activities is gradual. When one has attained the first trance, speech has ceased. When one has attained the second trance, thought initial and sustained has ceased. When one has attained the third trance, zest has ceased. When one has attained the fourth trance, inbreathing and outbreathing have ceased… Both perception and feeling have ceased when one has attained the cessation of perception and feeling.

(SN 36.11, tr. Pali Text Society vol IV p 146)